Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team

This project represents a unique collaboration between two very strong groups in the area of field robotics and control. The Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team is made up of researchers from University of California, Berkeley, the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics, and the Univeristy of Technology in Sydney's Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems Group. The ACFR and UTS team members have world-renowned experience with sensor fusion for autonomous vehicles at the theoretical and practical levels and have produced industrial products From UC Berkeley comes real-time avionics experience from the Berkeley Aerial Robots group, and DARPA Grand Challenge veterans. The UC Berkeley group also includes members and resources of the California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways with 10 years of experience with vehicle automation and control, the Berkeley Aerial Robots group also with 10 years of experience with autonomous vehicles. With the expertise in high level control provided by Berkeley and the expertise of ACFR and UTS in autonomous vehicles and sensor fusion, this team will be a formidable opponent in the DGC3.

The vision of the team, is a component based systems engineering design where the architecture of the system is by definition designed for testing, where a sensor upgrade does not downgrade the system, and where the functional intelligence of the system does not emerge from the tuning of parameters, but follows logically from the functional specifications. In order to achieve these design goals, we will use proven technologies which we have previously applied in our research in autonomous aerial vehicles, embedded systems, and fundamental control.

From the DARPA website

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007. The DARPA Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles conducting simulated military supply missions in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions.The DARPA Urban Challenge is an autonomous vehicle research and development program with the goal of developing technology that will keep warfighters off the battlefield and out of harm's way. The Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles maneuvering in a mock city environment, executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles.The program is conducted as a series of qualification steps leading to a competitive final event, scheduled to take place on November 3, 2007. The exact location will be announced before the National Qualification Event scheduled for October 2007. DARPA is offering $2M for the fastest qualifying vehicle, and $1M and $500,000 for second and third place.