Stanford's "Junior" passes driving test

Mountain View (CA) – Mock intersections and stopped cars were no match for Stanford University’s latest robotic car as it passed initial tests to enter DARPA’s Urban Challenge. Members of the Stanford Racing Team proudly showed off their heavily modified 2006 Volkswagen Passat dubbed “Junior” to DARPA representatives during an official site visit last Thursday at the Shoreline Amphitheatre parking lots in Mountain View. Equipped with rotating lasers and rack-mount servers, Junior easily completed all the DARPA requirements one and a half hours faster than the four hour minimum.

Junior had to navigate virtual streets marked off with cones and blocked with parked cars. It also had to avoid passing cars and drive through intersections. During the test, Junior had to stop and obey traffic lights along with using the correct blinker signals.

The key ingredient to Junior’s success is the Velodyne HD LIDAR unit mounted on top of the car which uses 64 lasers to blast out a 360 degree view of the area, 15 times a second. The laser unit feeds data to Intel quad-core and dual-core CPUs sitting in the trunk and the car’s software can track objects up to 65 meters away.

The site visit is one of the final stages the DARPA teams must complete before being selected for the November race. DARPA will pick 30 out of the 53 teams to start the race. 

DARPA’s Urban Challenge is the third race under the Grand Challenge line of contests. Robotic cars will need to navigate a cityscape environment complete with parked and passing cars along with intersections. DARPA hopes the research gained from this race will be used in making robotic cars suitable for driverless convoy vehicles (think Iraq).

No teams finished the first DARPA Grand Challenge race which had robotic cars race through the San Bernardino desert. In 2005, five teams finished the second Grand Challenge race in Primm Nevada with Stanford’s “Stanley” narrowly beating Carnegie Mellon’s Red Team.