The Stamford Racing team are readying themselves for the DARPA Urban Challenge in November.
The team today announced 'Junior', their vehicle designed to traverse the specially designed urban course that DARPA's come up with for this year's challenge. The concept of the Urban Challenge is to introduce an even greater level of complexity to the competition. Vehicles will have to negotiate more than just static obstacles. They'll have to observe traffic rules and avoid collisions with other vehicles.
The point of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsored event is to encourage boffins and the likes to find means to "keep warfighters off the battlefield and out of harm’s way". If autonomous/remotely controlled vehicles can be used to control the battlefield, then soldiers are safer... surely a good thing.
Stamford's Junior follows one of their previous challenge vehicles, Stanley. The demands on Junior are somewhat different to those placed on Stanely, however. Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, said "the current challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment." That means more sophisticated sensors, more data to process and clever software to not only analyse that data, but predict what situation the vehicle will be in over the course of the moments that follow.
Processing all that sensor data will be Intel Core2Quad racks and Core2Duo blades. Stanford reckon Junior will be some four times more powerful than Stanley... but that's just processing power. The software could well be far more sophisticated. However, given that Junior is a modified 2006 Passat wagon, we're not sure which of the two would win in a fight (Stanley was a Touareg 4wd).
HEXUS reckons that Stamford isn't going to bother with swanky software on Junior. Instead, we reckon they'll simply run multiple concurrent instances of Burnout, Carmageddon and GTA. That should do the trick. Well, it depends on how many credits the team gets per zombie killed and opponent wrecked...
That's Junior... you might notice a subtle difference between it and regular Passats.
For more info on Junior, check out Intel's and Stanford's press releases, and you might also fancy checking out the Urban Challenge website.
We'll leave you with one final thought. Junior will have an array of quad and dual core processors; chips from 2007... in an aeroplane's autopilot system, you may well find five Intel 80386 CPUs; chips from the 80s.
