The Great Robot Race Part II
Objectives
- Learn more about the 2005 Grand Challenge and about advances in mobile robotics
This assignment must be completed individually,
and you may not consult
with one another.
Create a new Microsoft Word or text document named YourUserName-A10.
As you saw in a previous assignment, NOVA has put together an hour-long special on the Grand Challenge, called "The Great Robot Race." We watched the first 29:34 minutes of the program on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoiJeIb0wBA, which leaves exactly 23 minutes to watch in this assignment.
After watching, answer each of the following questions using no more than 3 sentences per question:
- How did the Red Team's approach to navigation differ from that of the Standford Team?
- What things did you find surprising about the race and/or the outcome of the race, and which robots finished and in what order? Is this what you would have guess might occur?
Next go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/gray.html to read an interview with the Grand Challenge team from New Orleans and answer the following questions:
- What backgrounds did the New Orleans Team bring to the design of hardware and software, and how did Hurricane Katrina effect the progress of the New Orleans' robot hardware and software development?
- What was the $2 million bug and why did it happen?
Next go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/see.html to watch the slide-show on "What Robots See." (Note that this is Flash, so it will not work from an iPhone or iPad, but it will work from your laptop. Then answer the following questions:
- What is a laser scanner and what are the pros and cons of using laser scanners vs video "to see"?
- What is adaptive vision and what are the pros and cons of using adaptive vision vs radar "to see"?
- What are a cost maps and path planning and how are they helpful in the Grand Challenge?
- Think about your life today, and imagine you woke up blind tomorrow. How would blindness affect your life?
- If we had autonomously self-driving commercially-available vehicles, how would it transform your life as someone who is blind? And how do you think that might affect our society?
When you are finished, save the file as YourUserName-A10 and submit the file to the appropriate location in Moodle.