--- Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Fri, February 4, 2005 4:04 pm, Jeffrey Martin said:
DARPA will give you a million dollars if you can
create a self guided
land vehicle. There must be some elegant solution. -Jeff M.
If you've seen the first round of trials, you'll know it's not as easy as it looks.
I saw the first round of trials. It was pitiful. Hmmm... DARPA offering $1,000,000 for a successful self-guided car? Hmmm... cost of building a self-guided car? Old model fullsized chevy: $3,000 AMD 64 PC x 16 : $80,000 1 GB RAM x 32 : $8,000 1 TB Flash Memory : $20,000 GPS + spare : $800 video capture x4 : $1,000 radar : $1,000 tracking laser x5 : $25,000 1000 man-days of coding : $2,000,000 ---------- total cost $2,138,800
less DARPA award $1,000,000 ----------
net return ($1,138,800)
Sounds like a winner to me. ;')
Understand I consider this to be a minimum effort. We could drop the second GPs but that would only save us a few bucks and we'd have no failover should the primary fail and without a gps, and since the GPS would be the map source it'd make navigation very tough. Of course we could forego the GPS for mapping, but would need to add an altimieter and would need to program in a very accurate starting reference point. I could e off on the cost of the GPS, since we'd want the most accurate model we could get. It would be needed only for a starting point reference if the software was well written. The software to drive such a thing would require a combined software model utilizing a smart system with a very large database (1 TB may not be big enough), an AI algorithm capable of fast tree decision making (such as utilized by Google), possibly a nueral net for learning, recognition software (to detect moving and staionary objects, read signs and road markings), some fuzzy logic as part of the decision tree perhaps, and a controlling central unit to accept inputs from each system and co-ordinate commands. Of course you'd need to add mundane things like crash avoidance, lane changing, turning. All part of the knowledge base based on system inputs. Piece of cake. I could do this in six months with a team of 10 coders. Also, I'm using very cheap labor, probably Rusisans.
Brian Densmore
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