EECI08: Case Study - Autonomous Driving

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This lecture presents an overview of Alice, an autonomous vehicle built by Caltech undergraduates to participate in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Starting with the high level architecture, we describe some of the design choices that were made in the networked control systems (NCS) architecture and was as summarize the basic operation of the major software modules that are used to implement Alice's autonomous control system. More detailed descriptions of Alice's individual components will be given in future lectures.

Lecture Materials

• Lecture slides: Case Study - Alice
• Alice movies: NQE clips, GCE clips

Reading

• Alice: An Information-Rich Autonomous Vehicle for High-Speed Desert Navigation, Cremean et al. Journal of Field Robotics, 2006. This article provides an overview of Alice's architecture and operation.

• [http://gc.caltech.edu/media/papers/dgc07-final.pdf Sensing, Navigation and Reasoning Technologies

for the DARPA Urban Challenge], DARPA final report, 2007. This is the final report that was submitted to DARPA, documenting the operation of Alice in the 2007 Urban Challenge.

Additional Resources

• Team Caltech homepage - contains movies and other information about the project
• Team wiki - detailed information about Alice, including documentation on hardware and software (requires username and password)