Stanley (vehicle)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stanley driving itself in the desert.

Stanley is an autonomous vehicle created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It is a standard Volkswagen Touareg (an SUV) modified to be driven by onboard computers. It competed in, and won, the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, earning the Stanford Racing Team the 2 million dollar prize, the largest prize money in robotic history.

The sensors used by Stanley include five LIDAR laser-ranging units, a pair of 24 GHz RADAR units, a stereo camera, and a single-lens camera. Position sensing was provided by a GPS receiver, a GPS compass, an inertial guidance system, and wheel odometry information provided by the Touareg's internal CAN bus. Computing was provided by six low-power 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M based computers in the boot, running various incarnations of the Linux operating system, which actuate a drive-by-wire system developed by the ERL.

Stanley was characterized by a machine learning based approach to obstacle detection. Data from the LIDARs was fused with images from the vision system to perform more distant look-ahead. If a path of drivable terrain could not be detected for at least 40 meters in front of the vehicle, speed was decreased and the LIDARs used to locate a safe passage.

Also, Stanley drove by recording how a human drove the car through the desert, then assigning an accuracy value to each bit of data generated by its many sensors. After this modification was made, it began to speed at 45 mph down roads which were crisscrossed by shadows of trees. Before it started assigning accuracy values to its data, it would have shied away from the road - it would have been perceived as being crisscrossed with ditches, not shadows.

The project lead was Associate Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Other key contributors included Michael Montemerlo (software lead), Sven Strohband (lead engineer) and Cedric Dupont (vehicle lead), and Pamela Mahoney (communications lead).

Stanley is currently located at a garage near Stanford University, although it was displayed at the 2006 New York International Auto Show. In the Summer 2006, it will be displayed in the Smithsonian Museum (USA), followed by two years in the Volkswagen Autostadt Museum (Germany) and finally indefinitely in the Smithsonian Museum.

A test run was successfully done in Oschersleben, Germany, in June 2005 by Stanley's 'sister' Stanlette, another cooperation between Stanford University and Volkswagen ERL, which also has the function of being a development carrier.

Another VW Touareg vehicle ran in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. "Dora" from Team Banzai is powered by 3 Mac Mini computers running OS X. While they use the same base vehicle, the Stanford and Banzai teams are in no way related to each other.