Adventures at the Urban Challenge Participants' Conference

We just got back from the Urban Challenge Participants' Conference, held in Reston, VA. Aside from getting old veterans together to share war stories, the conference intended to clarify some rules of the Urban Challenge. From the conference, it became evident that the vehicles' priorities are 1. avoid collisions, 2. achieve missions, 3. obey traffic laws. Can anyone say autonomous demolition derby?

Oh, but that was only the beginning. In true CUDGC fashion, we left Ithaca for Reston at 7pm on Friday, about 2 hours after we'd intended to leave. We stopped for gas in middle-of-nowhere, PA, where we promptly filled up the tank for $80. Ouch. Not to worry though, we bought the gas courtesy of Acute Dream, Aaron's company (which consists of a single employee: Aaron). Feeling that we might not find another restaurant for awhile (hey, it was eastern Pennsylvania), we decided to stop for dinner. At Krispy Kreme. Ironically, it was the same Krispy Kreme we'd visited back in August as we returned from our first month in the desert.

Things went fine until we encountered road blocks at I-83 near Harrisburg, where our "avoid all tolls" MapQuest directions sent us traipsing about the southeastern Pennsylvania countryside.
That would have been fine, except our directions took us through some seriously shady cop-filled areas (cops with guns drawn and everything); the back seat constantly rang out with 3 peoples' calls of "po po po po po." 5 hours later we stumbled into the Hyatt Regency in Reston, at 2:30am. The entrance could not have been more appropriate. We pulled up into the little valet circle of the Hyatt Regency in Noah's Suburban:

The poor valet looked us over, clearly fearing for his life. As Pete opened the door, a small mountain of trash fell out onto the ground (along with 6 scraggly-looking college kids). We went to the front desk to check in, where we found out that the Hyatt had overbooked and did not have rooms for us! They gave us free rooms at a Marriott that was supposedly "just down the street." An hour and several more "po po's" later we stumbled into the Marriott. By this time it was about 3:30am, so we nearly lost it when we found out the Marriott only had rooms with single king-sized beds. I must say, four-star hotel or not, the couch is not a comfortable place to sleep. At least we got 3 hours of sleep and a free breakfast though, which helped ease the pain of last night's dinner, which for me consisted of 2 granola bars and some Ritz crackers. The conference went just fine:

We met a lot of contacts, including a guy from Daimler-Chrysler. How's an autonomous Mercedes sound to you? One word: hot.

Oh, and my favorite quote from Tony Tether, director of DARPA:

"This is Washington, and logic does not prevail."

The bottom line: when you click "avoid tolls" on MapQuest, you do so at your own risk.

"Hey, Pete, lemme give you a summary: this is tough. End of summary."

We had our first team meeting last night. We looked at the DARPA announcement to try to identify key behaviors and requirements. We also started to think about how we might create broad subsystems that would cover those requirements. In case you're curious, here are some of the things DARPA wants us to do:

• 6 hr. urban mission, 60 miles, “moving traffic.”
• Obey traffic laws and operate safely
• Narrow lanes, sharp turns, traffic-congested intersections
• Obstacles: curbstones, utility poles, hydrants, blocked streets, parked vehicles, trees, pedestrians, moving vehicles
• Speed control and speed limits
• Safe following behavior, assured clear distance
• Safe check-and-go behavior when passing a vehicle or obstacle, pulling out of a parking spot, moving through intersections
• Stay in the proper lane, even around turns and through intersections
• Be safe even when GPS cuts out
• Follow paved and unpaved roads and stay in your lane even with sparse or inaccurate waypoints
• Change lanes safely and only when appropriate: not at an intersection
• Merge with traffic after an intersection
• Pull across lanes of moving traffic to merge with moving traffic in an opposing lane
• Stop within 1 meter of the stop sign and start according to intersection precedence
• Queue and move properly in intersections: take turns
• Pull into and back out of a designated parking space
• 3-point turns for U-turning
• Dynamically replan if the route is impassable

Yeah. Not sure there's much to say about that.

GAME ON

We've sat idle long enough. We know what we did wrong, and we know how to fix it. It is time to take on the next Grand Challenge: the urban challenge. That's right, it's coming to a city near you: autonomous driving. In traffic. It is ON.

Team Cornell will rise again!