Darpa Grand Challenge

[digimushu]

I think you guys heard of the Darpa Grand Challenge right?

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

u know, the 150 miles race from LA - Nevada that had a lot of schools involved? My school, Virginia Tech was one of the schools involved. LSU and Carnegie Mellon, too, was involved. Any opinions on what we could do with technologies like this at home(i mean M'sia, ok)?

Anyone has any idea of the implications of this on our daily lives?

or is it just a waste of time?

[masterof_none]

my roommate is one of the people who get involved in the second round of DARPA grand challenge. (but about to drop it because it's too time consuming).

the race is not about the money, it's about the challenge. People spend a lot of money to qualify for this race (even more than the 1 or 2 millions that DARPA offered).

The best team that I found is Team Blue, from Berkeley. Instead of using expensive SUV's and huge Truck, they use an autonomous motorbike ! (and surprisingly, it balanced). Check out their website and watch the video, you'll be amazed. (GhostRiderRobot) (http://www.ghostriderrobot.com/)

we're definitely can do it back at home. but if the Grand Challange is too expensive, we can start doing some kids robot (like FIRST (http://www.usfirst.org/) is doing now).

[digimushu]

Yeah, but the problem is that the Malaysian society itself is very resistant to new technologies. I wonder why? lets just say a person come back to Malaysia with knowledge of things like smart materials and neural networks. Most likely he wont get a satisfying professional life at home. Our research, as has been discussed in other threads, is dated. Personally, i feel that we have the facilities and resources back home, just that we dont have the right mentality.

Last sem, i was one of the judges for the FIRST league. It was pretty cool maybe we can lobby for the education ministry to support it?

[chenchow]

I did a google search on something like what FIRST in doing for back in Malaysia and I found that Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Innovation has organized Malaysia Games Robot Festival in August 2004.

Discription in the website:-
RoboFest is the annual Robot Games Festival aimed at creating and stimulating interest of Malaysia at all spectrum of society from educational, industry to general public in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. To achieve this objective, the related activities such as robot contest, robot clinics, drawing contest, exhibitions and seminars are organised.

It is at http://www.robofest.org.my/ . I found it cached by Google on 14th Sep, but at this current moment, the website seems down or something, so I only find the cached copy from google. You can find the link by doing a9.com/robofest as well.

[digimushu]

Interesting, someone beat us to the chase. However, is our education system structured for such events?

or should i put it this way, are our student samrt enough to 'think outside the box'?

[chenchow]

In fact, I believe that the government is using all these competitions to gradually build the students' capabilities. I believe those in Penang would have known about RECSAM competition, where F4, F5 students are supposed to do research for a year or two and then present your research and development or innovation finding in RECSAM in Penang. It is held once in 2 years, and there have been a great followings among many schools in Penang state.

Another interesting one. "Some 45 teams of Form 4 and 5 students gathered recently at Universiti Malaya for the eagerly awaited finals of the Technology Rocket Programme.The nationwide competition was held for the second time, challenging students to build space rockets. " There are 900 participants from 300 schools get involved in this.

http://metro.thestar.com.my/news/2004/7/8534755.html

[chenchow]

This is another one:-
http://www97.intel.com/odyssey/Story.aspx?storyid=118

Students at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsa (Rifle Range National Secondary School) capped their studies of Newton's Laws of Motion by crafting a water rocket and competing against other rocketeers.

[digimushu]

Sounds great then, many of those events look similar to the 'Science Olympics' that i used to organize in my high school days.

However, back to the topic. Is there any more hope of using the stuff they use in the DARPA grand challenge in M'sia?

[chenchow]

We could definitely brainstorm on this idea and send a memo or recommendation to Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. It is definitely something very possible.

Perhaps, we could do a research on such opportunities in Malaysia and then we do an analysis on what's lacking and we can propose various competitions, events that could help stimulate the interest of Malaysians back home.

[masterof_none]

However, back to the topic. Is there any more hope of using the stuff they use in the DARPA grand challenge in M'sia?

Most of the stuff that are being used by participants at Darpa Grand Challenge are expensive:
- A huge truck/Jeep/SUV (or any vehicle).
- Expensive Sensors
- Complicated programs

I think if we can ask for donation and send 'Team Malaysia - ReCom',
that would be really cool. we can use Proton car or something. But again, I do seriously think we need to be physically meet to build the actual robot in that case. and it's quite time consuming (unless, after my graduation next year :)).

[digimushu]

hahahaha
that would be good
unfortunately, the team leader has to be an american citizen(whoops!). We could have perodua to donate a few Kembaras(since it is 4WD anyways).

But seriously, I think we can start by making like a hybrid electric vehicle competition in M'sia. I think the market is ripe and ready for it. If we can get a wira to put out 50mpq, that would be one hell of an achievement.

Any ideas?

[masterof_none]

ReCom Super Grand Challange.
Prize : trip to California .

Requirement: Building autonomous rubber tapping device that could autonomously calculate the amount of trees, tap the rubber, calculate the value of the rubber according to the recent(updated) market price, sell it to the local store, and go back home.

OR

Build an autonomous kite that could fly from Johor Bahru to Perlis.

OR

Build an autnomous bicycle (or car) that could fetch a kid to go to school and back home at a specific amount of time.

OR

Build an autonomous monkey that could fetch the coconuts double or triple the time the way monkey does.

OR

Build a rocket, and see which one fly the highest.

.......

list goes on..

These are the things that we could do, in fact, we can come up with even more creative solutions to our current problems (or increase our effieciency).

Darpa created the challenge with specific motives: so that the robot could autonomously go hunt some terrorists in the caves or something (although some of the technology would be given back to the world, e.g GPS and internet.)

But we can create a challenge of our own too.

[digimushu]

Try this one:
a plate that can clean itself

[luke]

May I add one more?

Code a script that give out warnings "Hey, you guys are digressing from the topic! Get back to the topic in the next post or I'll close this discussion!" in ReCom

:lol:

[digimushu]

Yes boss!
Actually in one of the Journals that i'm submitting my papers to, i see some research going into off-road locomotion. Maybe we can make a padi harvester that is autonomous? It has similar concept to the darpa challenge but all you need to do is to get from one end of the sawah to the other.

[Europa]

FYI, the one about rockets?
Sounds like the ongoing Ansari X-Prize and the X-Prize Challenge to be launched next year!

Back to the original post : I guess we can't really tell on the benifits yet, since advancements in mechtronics,robotics and autonomous systems is progressing in multiple fronts. But the military will certainly take an aggresive approach towards research in these fields, but it'll take some time before the innovations will reach the civilian industry. Hopefully, we'll get cars with autopilots?

Pity the DARPA challenge didn't turn out a winner though. The longest distance achieved was about a mile isn't it?

[digimushu]

Sigh, the problem with cars with autopilots are that you will need X-by-wire technology. A truly X-by-wire car will be totally useless in the event of an alternator failure.

let me share with you an experience. My car has electronic engine control, stability assist and electrohydraulic assisted steering. My alternator died on the way to DC for the PM's reception and everything on my car turned to mush. Steering feels heavy, engine pickup was slow, transmission was doing funny stuff. Within 15 mins, my car was just a huge chunk of steel, aluminium and composites. This is on a car that still has mostly electrical assist systems, not fully electrical systems. No X-by-wire system is fully fault tolerant yet, although Mercedes has some of that tech in their car. Imagine your brake-by-wire system failing while you are driving 75mph on a highway because your alternator died. DARPA grand challenge will be the testing ground to decide which components will be fully electrical or mechanical.

Many problems will need to be resolved before stuff from the DARPA grand challenge makes it to the market. 'by-wire' technology has been in the market for a long time in airplanes but not for cars since fault-tolerance is costly.

I feel that cars are moving to the 'by-wire' stage but before that, we need fault-tolerance and a 42V system for the electrical systems in the vehicle.

Any other thoughts?

[chenchow]

may be some of you who are involved in serious research could submit an article to ReMag to share with others on how you get involved in research and various endeavors. That may ignite some interest among the members to feel more in sync with engineering, research, innovation etc.

[gonjeng]

true... the 'by-wire' thingie is easier said than done. it is said that sometimes it is easier to develop the '-by-wire' technology than the 'ohh crap' system, in case the autonomous system fails :)

[Europa]

Well, I don't know much about E&E but couldn't there be redundancies built into the system? Is it because the manufacturers don't want to add on additional cost onto the price tag?
If something like this happens onto say, a deep space probe, whoever that builts it will get clobbered!

IMHO,I think mechanical will triumph over electrical for the short term since its gonna cost more to ensure that electrical systems have backups in case a primary component shorts out. As for the future, who knows?

[digimushu]

Yep, there are redundancies. Everything that makes the system robust against errors are called fault-tolerance.
Tou are right, in cars, typically we want something cheap but works well enough but we do not want the cars to cost as much as a Boeing 727 each.

The true solution to this problem lies between an optimized marriage of electrical and mechanical engineering. There are many advantages to X-by-wire technology such as:
- Four wheel steering
- Improved unified stability assist
- Reduced vehicle weight for fuel efficiency
- More control over the Yaw, pitch and roll stability of the vehicle.

As i say, the move the X-by-wire is inevitable Hence, i see the Grand Challenge as the proving grounds for all these technologies.

[Europa]

I see.
But marrying electrical and mechanical systems would certainly have their own problems to iron out isn't it? And which would be favoured more in this case? Mechanical suffers from wear and tear, whereas electrical might suffer from shorts.

Yeah, x-by-wire is the future, but how soon will it be?
DARPA Grand Challenge just showed that its still a long way off, with their entrees just flopped out one after another. Maybe next year's repeat will showcase something better, I hope.

[digimushu]

hrmmm..
not exactly flop. hehehe

i think the Carnegie Mellon Team did pretty well. only that their sensor array was 'injured' during the qualifying rounds. Also, i think Virginia Tech's team(not blowing my trumpet ,ok?) was doing quite well. they were one of the teams that managed to go through the qualifying course without craashing into anything. The only problem i think is with software. most of the software for the competitiors were developed in-house, thus making it 'not-so-perfect'.

'by-wire' will come, only after the legal disputes are over,and we make sure it is reasonably safe.

[gonjeng]

aiseh, if you are talking about mechanical vs. electrical, there are a lot of pros and cons, thus making it hard to explicitly say which one is a better approach :) plus, talking in a broader sense, the 'optimized marriage' between the two for one application is different for the other...

while admitting that im a little ignorant about the automotive industry, the 'by-wire' tech is where the aerospace industry heading to. you can look at the recent fighter and commercial jets nowadays. however, as i said, it is easier said than that. first, the controls have to produce a very accurate output. if i remember correctly, gulfstream puts a condition that for the tech to be certified, the accuracy has to be up to the 6 or 9 decimal points. for an airplane, i can say that is hard. second, installing redundancies mean adding weight and adding weight means degrading performance :)

ehh hmm... after writing all those, baru sedar that the thread is about DARPA thingie. ohh well, hopefully ade laa kot skit related to the topic :)

[digimushu]

hrmm, you are not too far off. The networked control system on some of the DARPA vehicles are aircraft based ifi can remember right. Currently, by-wire protocol technology that is fault tolerant is TTP-C, which is being used on most aircrafts(including AIRBUS). I know a prof in AUstria is trying to push for a streamlined version of TTP-C, called TTP-A, for bus networking of the controlled system on by-wire cars. Unfortunately, CAN, anoter protocol created by Bosch Corporation is currently competing against TTP-C. It remains to be seen who will win out the war of the network protocols. These networked control systems will need a very robust network to talk to each other. Say, doesn't an F-14 have like 30 computers on board?

Personally, I can see our cars mover towards more electrical parts. Before long, i can tell you that our mechanics will need to have at least an Associate's degree to 'operate' on our cars. Proton will need to start doing more research into that to keep up with modern tech.

[wyeoh]

Personally, the result of the grand challenge doesn't seem to be who has the magic box that performs miracles, or who creates the next ultra efficient locomotion system, but rather who is able to keep all the components working together in sync. DARPA has a great history of getting things started in the past, using money as the incentive. Two million to them is peanuts if one team can actually cross the finish line. :)

As for practicing this in Malaysia, imagine an autonomous sampan moving on Sg. Redang. (did I remember the name right?). It would be hilarious. :) Though I definitely think that the imagination and enthusiasm should start to be cultivated from childhood. Organize more science camps, fairs, competitions. The educational ministry is starting to show promise in that direction, with organizing Lego Mindstorm competitions and so on. Hopefully, it will breed a new generation of outside-the-box-thinkers.

As for the group from Berkeley last year with a not-too-expensive motorcycle, didn't it tip over after crossing the starting line during the final competition? *grin... just rubbing those of you who are from there... :)

[digimushu]

An update from Virginia Tech....



Virginia Tech qualifies two vehicles for $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge race



http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?itemno=830

Any news from the other schools?

[pathfinder]

Carnegie Mellon :D

http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050607_redteam.html

[Europa]

Hmm, the second race is about to be held soon, and yet no updates?

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/automotivetech/097a1196aeb84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/automotivetech/b05a1196aeb84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/09/29/robot.race.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/26/robotrace.ap/index.html

[digimushu]

http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2005&itemno=1038

Virginia Tech?s ?Cliff? and ?Rocky? were among an elite group of 23 autonomous vehicles that revved their engines on Oct. 8 at the starting line of the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge race through the Mojave Desert.

The Virginia Tech Grand Challenge team ? most of them undergraduate engineering students ? found out Wednesday at the California Speedway in Fontana that both their autonomous vehicles proved themselves worthy during the past week-and-a-half of final qualifying at the Speedway.

On Tuesday, Grand Challenge sponsor DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon?s research arm) announced that Rocky was one of 10 vehicles slated for the starting line. At that time, Charles Reinholtz, co-adviser of the Virginia Tech team and Alumni Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering (ME), wasn?t so sure that Cliff would make it into the final 23.

?In what must surely be one of the greatest comebacks in autonomous vehicle racing history, Cliff vaulted his way into the finals with a late surge of impressive autonomy,? Reinholtz said on Wednesday.


Go Hokies!

[digimushu]

Stanford is the winner!

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/october12/stanleyfinish-100905.html

In a race that began and ended in a casino parking lot and traversed 132 miles of desert southwest of Las Vegas on Oct. 8, the Stanford Racing Team's autonomous robotic car, Stanley, won big. The artificially intelligent car traversed the off-road course in a little less than seven hours, yielding both a $2 million payout and a lofty place in the history of robotics and technology...

So a car is smart enough to drive itself from point A to point B, provided you spend enough time debugging the program.