Next Meeting:  May 7, 2008

Wednesday, May 7, 7:00PM Pacific
at 7:00, 5-minute business meeting
at 7:05, speaker presentation

Carnegie Mellon University West Coast (directions http://west.cmu.edu/who_we_are/visitor)

Ben Pitzer, Annie Lien, for Team AnnieWAY 

AnnieWAY, an autonomous vehicle that is capable of driving through urban scenarios and that successfully entered the finals of the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007 competition.

This talk reports on AnnieWAY, an autonomous vehicle that is capable of driving through urban scenarios and that successfully entered the finals of the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007 competition.  We describe the main challenges imposed and the major hardware components.  We outline the underlying software structure and focus on selected algorithms.  Environmental perception mainly relies on a recent laser scanner, which delivers both range and reflectivity measurements.  While range measurements are used to provide 3D scene geometry, measuring reflectivity allows for robust lane marker detection.  Mission and maneuver planning is conducted via a concurrent hierarchical state machine that generates behavior in accordance with California traffic laws.  We conclude with a report of the results achieved during the competition.

Team AnnieWAY:

Team AnnieWAY was one of four international teams chosen to participate in the DARPA Urban Challenge National Qualifying Event, October 2007.  In the end, Team AnnieWAY was one of eleven finalists chosen for the final race on November 3, 2007. Team AnnieWAY began as a spin-off of the Collaborative Research Center on Cognitive Automobiles, started January 1, 2006 by the German Research Foundation (DFG).  Research professionals and graduate students from the University of Karlsruhe, the Technical University of Munich, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (IITB in Karlsruhe), and the Universitaet der Bundeswehr Munich work together in this research center.  The scope of Team AnnieWAY is to extract early research results from the Cognitive Automobiles project that would allow real-time operation of the vehicle under the restricted traffic environment in the Urban Challenge.  Its team members are professionals in the fields of image processing, 3D perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, real time system design, driver assistance systems, autonomous driving, and usability / human factors research.  

Annie Lien:

Annie Lien earned a B.A. summa cum laude in Classics (1998), a B.A. summa cum laude in History (1998), and a M.A. summa cum laude in Museum Studies-User Interaction (2005).  Ms. Lien worked as User Experience Researcher and Speech Technology Linguist at Robert Bosch, Research and Technology Center, Palo Alto, where she was involved in a speech technology project sponsored by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  It was during this time at Bosch when Ms. Lien joined Team AnnieWAY as team leader and worked on the DARPA Urban Challenge project on a part-time voluntary basis.  Currently, Ms. Lien is User Experience & Usability Research Consultant to the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory, Palo Alto.  Ms. Lien focuses on social-psychological experimental studies of human-computer interaction, human factors research, and usability testing.  

Ben Pitzer:

Ben Pitzer received a Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from the RTWH Aachen University in 2005.  Mr. Pitzer is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and Robert Bosch LLC in Palo Alto, California.  Mr. Pitzer’s research interests are autonomous systems, probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and computer graphics.  As a co-founder and member of Team AnnieWAY, Mr. Pitzer was responsible for system design, environment perception, and vehicle behavior.