The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge The Great Robot Race [Paperback]

The DARPA Grand Challenge was a landmark in the field of robotics: a race by autonomous vehicles through 132 miles of rough Nevada terrain. It showcased exciting and unprecedented capabilities in robotic perception, navigation, and control. The event took place in October 2005 and drew teams of competitors from academia and industry, as well as many garage hobbyists. This book presents fifteen technical papers that describe each team's driverless vehicle, race strategy, and insights. As a whole, they present the state of the art in autonomous vehicle technology and offer a glimpse of future technology for tomorrows driverless cars.

This book presents fifteen technical papers that are written at a level that makes them easily accessible to a broad technical audience, describing the technology behind most of the robotic vehicles that participated in the famous DARPA Grand Challenge.

At the dawn of the new millennium, robotics is undergoing a major transformation in scope and dimension. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics is rapidly expanding into the challenges of unstructured environments. Interacting with, assi- ing, serving, and exploring with humans, the emerging robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The goal of the new series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field. The volume edited by Martin Buehler, Karl Iagnemma and Sanjiv Singh presents a unique and extensive collection of the scientific results by the teams which took part into the DARPA Grand Challenge in October 2005 in the Nevada desert. This event reached an incredible peak of popularity ls(