A Perspective on Emerging Automotive Safety Applications, Derived from Lessons Learned through Participation in the DARPA Grand Challenges

This paper reports on various aspects of the Intelligent Vehicle Systems (IVS) team's involvement in the recent 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, wherein our platform, the autonomous XAV-250, competed as one of the 11 finalists qualifying for the event. We provide a candid discussion of the hardware and software design process that led to our team's entry, along with lessons learned at this event and derived from participation in the two previous Grand Challenges. In addition, we give an overview of our vision-, radar-, and LIDAR-based perceptual sensing suite, its fusion with a military-grade inertial navigation package, and the map-based control and planning architectures used leading up to and during the event. The underlying theme of this article is to elucidate how the development of future automotive safety systems can potentially be accelerated by tackling the technological challenges of autonomous ground vehicle robotics. Of interest, we will discuss how a production manufacturing mindset imposes a unique set of constraints upon approaching the problem and how this worked for and against us, given the very compressed timeline of the contests. (c) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.