The Urban Challenge and the Promise of Autonomous Vehicles

The Urban Challenge was a robotic vehicle race through a simulated urban environment.  Full size autonomous vehicles were required to complete a 60 mile course, while independently reasoning about other autonomous and human driven vehicles.  The vehicles were required to safely handle intersections, multi-lane roads, parking lots and unusual situations.  Teams from around the world attempted the competition with eleven qualifying for the final challenge. 

In this talk I describe the Urban Challenge and Boss, the vehicle that won the challenge.  Boss is a modified Chevy Tahoe that fuses data from many sensors to interpret the world around it and drive safely. I will highlight how Boss incorporates radar and lidar data to track moving vehicles and how this information is used.  I will also speculate on the future of autonomous vehicles and the critical open challenges.

Bio

Chris Urmson is an assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the technical staff at Google.  He was the Director of Technology for Tartan Racing at Carnegie Mellon University, helping the team to win the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Chris has developed numerous robotic navigation architectures and software systems currently in use by Carnegie Mellon University, NASA JPL and NASA Ames.  He has made significant contributions to the development of over a half dozen robots, with an emphasis on software development and system integration.  He earned his PhD in 2005 from Carnegie Mellon University and his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1998.  Chris has earned a variety of corporate and academic awards including being named a Siebel Scholar, and receiving technology innovation awards from Boeing Phantom Works and SAIC.