A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car (AC), driverless car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input. Self-driving cars are responsible for perceiving the environment, monitoring important systems, and control, including navigation. Perception accepts visual and audio data from outside and inside the car and interpret the input to abstractly render the vehicle and its surroundings. The control system then takes actions to move the vehicle, considering the route, road conditions, traffic controls, and obstacles.
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots, and new Challenges are still being conceived. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was tasked with building robotic teams to autonomously map, navigate, and search subterranean environments. Such teams could be useful in exploring hazardous areas and in search and rescue.
The European Land-Robot Trial (ELROB) is a European event which demonstrates the abilities of modern robots.
The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) began in 1991 on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the longest running university-based robotics competition in the world. Since 1991, collegiate teams with the backing of industry and government have fielded autonomous flying robots in an attempt to perform missions requiring robotic behaviors never before exhibited by a flying machine. In 1990, the term “aerial robotics” was coined by competition creator Robert Michelson to describe a new class of small highly intelligent flying machines. The successive years of competition saw these aerial robots grow in their capabilities from vehicles that could at first barely maintain themselves in the air, to the most recent automatons which are self-stable, self-navigating, and able to interact with their environment—especially objects on the ground.
A robot competition is an event where the abilities and characteristics of robots may be tested and assessed. Usually they have to beat other robots in order to become the best one. Many competitions are for schools but several competitions with professional and hobbyist participants are also arising.
TerraMax is the trademark for autonomous/unmanned ground vehicle technology developed by Oshkosh Defense. Primary military uses for the technology are seen as reconnaissance missions and freight transport in high-risk areas so freeing soldiers from possible attacks, ambushes or the threat of mines and IEDs. The technology could also be used in civilian settings, such as autonomous snow clearing at airports.
Robofest is an autonomous robotics competition for 4th - 12th graders. It is similar to FIRST Lego League (FLL), but while FLL limits the student's robots to Lego Mindstorms robots, Robofest allows the student to use any robotics system, parts, materials, or even custom electronics, in some of the events. Note that FLL students are required to use parts manufactured by Lego only, preventing the use of such aids as string or glue. Another important difference is that Robofest games have UTF components. Students must solve the unveiled tasks and factors within 30 minutes work-time without external help. Lawrence Tech's Robofest was founded by Computer Science Professor Dr. Chan-Jin Chung in 1999–2000 academic year and is sponsored by Lawrence Technological University and other sponsors. LTU's Robofest is also held internationally, in countries including Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, England, France, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Macau, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and UAE. Teams who win their regional event are welcome to participate at the worldwide tournament held at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan. ROBOFEST is a registered trademark of Lawrence Technological University. Robofest is one of the largest University led robotics competitions in the world for pre college students.
RoboJackets is a group of Georgia Tech students, faculty, and alumni that aims to enhance the understanding of the field of robotics and its applications. The team also strives to increase of the number of students exposed to it. The group, located in the Student Competition Center, allows students to engage in a wide range of engineering-related activities, and has members from almost every engineering major of study offered at Georgia Tech. Students work collaboratively in a group environment and have the abilities to pursue projects on their own.
The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was commonly known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. It took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base, in Victorville, California, in the West of the United States. Discovery's Science channel followed a few of the teams and covered the Urban Challenge in its RobocarsArchived 2008-07-30 at the Wayback Machine series.
Ernest Lenard (Ernie) Hall, PhD, PE, is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in the School of Dynamic Systems in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati. He was also the Paul E. Geier Professor of Robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He has also held joint appointments at the University of Cincinnati with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. He regularly collaborates with faculty and students in other colleges at University of Cincinnati, as well as civic groups, including the FIRST Lego League, the Ohio Academy of Science, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. While consulting with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he became interested in efforts to make useful robots for some of the dangerous tasks encountered by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and NASA. He noted the importance of combining image processing algorithms with manipulators and controller to build intelligent robots, especially in automatic target recognition. He has founded and has co-chaired an annual conference on Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision for the past 25 years to provide a forum for new innovations in this field. He sits as the first Paul. E. Geier Professor of Robotics at the University of Cincinnati. At the University of Cincinnati, he established the Center for Robotics Research, which encourages robotics activities in industry, medicine, defense, and even at home with projects like a robot lawn mower. He also founded the UC Robot Team that has participated in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition for the past 15 years and the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and 2007. He has also served as a judge for the Cincinnati FIRST Lego League for two years and has been called the Woodie Flowers of Cincinnati for giving the Gracious Professionalism award. In 2006, Ernest L. Hall won the Grand Prize in the "Made in Express" contest sponsored by Microsoft. His entry for the contest was an all-terrain self-maneuverable robot developed using Microsoft Visual Studio Express. He donated the $10,000 cash prize from the contest back to the University of Cincinnati to support robotics.
There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.
CajunBot refers to the autonomous ground vehicles developed by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for the DARPA Grand Challenges. CajunBot was featured on CNN and on the Discovery Channel science series Robocars.
The Multi Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) is a 1.6 million dollar prize competition for autonomous mobile robots funded by TARDEC and the DSTO, the primary research organizations for Tank and Defense research in the United States and Australia respectively. The goal of the competition is to create multi-vehicle robotic teams that can execute an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission in a dynamic urban environment. The challenge required competitors to map a 500 m x 500 m challenge area in under 3.5 hours and to correctly locate, classify and recognise all simulated threats. The challenge event was conducted in Adelaide, Australia, during November 2010.
The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) is an operating unit within the Robotics Institute (RI) of Carnegie Mellon University. NREC works closely with government and industry clients to apply robotic technologies to real-world processes and products, including unmanned vehicle and platform design, autonomy, sensing and image processing, machine learning, manipulation, and human–robot interaction.
Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.
UGV Interoperability Profile (UGV IOP), Robotics and Autonomous Systems – Ground IOP (RAS-G IOP) or simply IOP was originally an initiative started by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) to organize and maintain open architecture interoperability standards for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). A primary goal of this initiative is to leverage existing and emerging standards within the Unmanned Vehicle (UxV) community such as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) AS-4 Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) standard and the Army Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Project Office IOPs.
Torc Robotics (Torc), an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck, is an American autonomous truck company headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, with operations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Austin, Texas; and Stuttgart, Germany. Torc is testing autonomous trucks in Virginia, New Mexico, and Texas and is taking a pure play approach to commercialization – focusing at first on one platform in one region.
Margarita Chli is an assistant professor and leader of the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Chli is a leader in the field of computer vision and robotics and was on the team of researchers to develop the first fully autonomous helicopter with onboard localization and mapping. Chli is also the Vice Director of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Her research currently focuses on developing visual perception and intelligence in flying autonomous robotic systems.
Chan-Jin Chung (정찬진), commonly known as CJ Chung, is a full professor of computer science at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) in Michigan, USA. He founded an international autonomous robotics competition called Robofest in the 1999–2000 academic year as well as numerous educational programs for youth by integrating STEM, arts, autonomous robotics, and computer science. He also served as the founding USA National Organizer of World Robot Olympiad (WRO) in 2014 and 2015. He also started the WISER conference in 2014. He is working on developing a computer science curriculum for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) with a support from National Science Foundation . His research areas include evolutionary computation, cultural algorithms, intelligent systems & autonomous mobile robotics, software engineering, machine learning & deep learning, computer science education, and educational robotics.
The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is the main and, as of July 2023, the only active racing series for autonomous race cars. The vehicles participating in the IAC are SAE level 4 autonomous as they are capable of completing circuit laps and overtaking manoeuvres without any human intervention.
