Robots Start Your Engines

By Philip Graitcer

Atlanta, GA – In a parking lot alongside the traffic-snarled Downtown Connector, a car moves along the pavement, between yellow lines and around traffic cones. Georgia Tech scientists are hoping that this car may one day help improve Atlanta's traffic. Philip Graitcer has the story.

The silver 2007 Porche Cayenne looks like any other SUV - except on its roof and bumpers are odd rectangular black boxes and cylindrical objects that look like carriage lights.

Balch: on top of the vehicle we have 6 color cameras that are how the robot sees

That's right, the car, called Sting, is a robot, able to drive itself, and it's being built by Tech scientists like Tucker Balch. He pops open the Sting's trunk.

Balch: all these cables from all over the vehicle converge in the back where we have 8 servers, the kind of server that would be running a moderately sized business.

The car's computers, radar, lasers, and geographic positioning system are off the shelf hardware. The hard part is getting this equipment to work together and for Sting to drive itself.Magnus Eggersted is the Tech professor in charge of developing the software, Sting's brain

Eggersted: How do you make this car truly autonomous and truly smart in the sense that not only manages to stay in the right lane, but figures out that maybe it is time to change lanes, and maybe there is traffic congestion up ahead.

Sting is Tech's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, created the Urban Challenge to get scientists to build robotic vehicles that can be used in urban military missions. Lt. Colonel John Surdu, is a DARPA project manager.

Surdu:DARPA is really interested in saving. You can imagine when guys driving convoys are tired and cold and wet that having technology that helps you stay on path would be useful.

Surdu sees commercial applications for this technology, too.

Surdu: You're familiar with driving on the Beltway during rush hour, so imagine technology like this that would keep people saving, keep traffic flowing, good lane following, would be useful.

53 teams are trying to get into the finals where a dozen robots will race each other. The winner gets two million dollars. Today, three judges from DARPA are watching Sting go through its paces to see if it qualifies. The car has been programmed to do a series of turns, stops, yields and u-turns. From the 5th floor of a nearby parking deck, the head of the School of Interactive Computing, Aaron Bobbick, watches anxiously

Bobbick: he's going to come up behind this vehicle .you see before there was one there and one here.

The other car drives on, but Sting stays stopped. Nine months of work and a million dollars of hardware and staff time are on the line. Bobbick is tense.

Bobbick: my daughter learned to drive last year, this is more painful to watch......

For four hours, the DARPA judges put Sting through its paces. Afterwards they had no comment, but Balch is encouraged.

Balch: We nailed the toughest test, which was the intersection stuff .we definitely passed 3 of the 4 tests and maybe half of the other one.

The Tech team won't learn if it makes the finals until August. If it does, Sting will meet the other robot cars in November on a mock urban course somewhere in Nevada.