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Kat-5 is an autonomous vehicle created by Team Gray, an organization comprising employees from The Gray Insurance Company and students from Tulane University's School of Engineering, for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Kat-5 is a 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid modified with the sensors and actuators needed for autonomous operation. It has an INS/GPS (Inertial Navigation System/Global Positioning System) from Oxford Technical Solutions and LIDAR units from SICK and Riegl. Kat-5 finished the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and placed fourth with a time of 7 hours, 30 minutes, only 37 minutes behind Stanley, the winner of the competition. Kat-5 is powered by almost 100% pure Java and runs both the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
Kat-5 uses oscillating LIDARs and information from the INS/GPS unit to create a picture of the surrounding environment. This information is then used to build a path for the vehicle to follow. Kat-5's primary electrical system, used to run the computers and drive-by-wire system, is powered by the standard electrical system of the vehicle while the 24-volt system, used to power the LIDAR sensors, is powered by six solar panels on the roof platform of the vehicle.
During the National Qualification Event of the Grand Challenge, Kat-5 suffered 2 major crashes and one stall (due to a faulty circuit breaker) before finally completing three runs. The last run completed was done flawlessly with Kat-5 avoiding every obstacle and passing through all 50 required gates. The vehicle was given a pole position of 16 going into the Grand Challenge Event in Primm, NV.
On the morning of October 8, 2005, Kat-5 left the starting line without a hitch and began the 132-mile journey through the surrounding desert. Although given the opportunity to stop at sunset and continue the race the following morning, the team chose to allow their vehicle to finish that night since darkness would have no effect on the vehicle's performance.
After crossing the finish line, it was found that Kat-5 had completed the entire race using only 7 gallons of fuel, averaging a little less than 19 miles per gallon. The vehicle averaged 17.5 miles per hour throughout the course of the race. It was later discovered that a small software bug had caused the vehicle to slow to a crawl in the wider segments of the race.
Team Gray was made up of IT professionals from within the company and students from Tulane University’s Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering departments. Eric Gray, President and Director of The Gray Exploration Company and The Gray Oil & Gas Company, was the leader of the team. The primary development team consisted of six people:
The team developed Kat-5 in a period of six actual months (three weeks were lost to Hurricane Katrina) at a total cost of approximately $650,000. The physical value of the vehicle when it ran on October 8 was estimated to be $150,000.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
A student design competition is a specific form of a student competition relating to design. Design competitions can be technical or purely aesthetic. The objective of technical competitions is to introduce students to real-world engineering situations and to teach students project-management and fabrication techniques used in industry. Aesthetic competitions usually require art and design skills.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the best computer science programs over the decades. As of 2024 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for No. 1 with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley.
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.
Draper Laboratory is an American non-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. The laboratory specializes in the design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions to problems in national security, space exploration, health care and energy.
Sandstorm is an autonomous vehicle created by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, for the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge competition. It is a heavily modified 1986 M998 HMMWV.
Stanley is an autonomous car created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, earning the Stanford Racing Team a $2 million prize.
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.
H1ghlander is an autonomous vehicle. Created by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, it is a heavily modified 1999 HUMMER H1. It competed in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Announced in 2002, the first DARPA Grand Challenge was a driverless car competition held on March 13, 2004 in the Mojave Desert region of the United States. The 150 miles (240 km) route followed Interstate 15 from just before Barstow, California to just past the California-Nevada border in Primm. None of the robot vehicles finished the route. The vehicle of Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team traveled the farthest distance, completing 11.78 km (7.32 mi) of the course. The $1 million prize remained unclaimed.
The second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was a 212 km (132 mi) off-road course that began at 6:40 am on October 8, 2005, near the California/Nevada state line. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 11.78 km (7.32 mi) distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race. Five vehicles successfully completed the course:
There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.
Velodyne Lidar is a Silicon Valley-based lidar technology company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics in 2016. As of July 2020, the company has had about 300 customers. Velodyne Lidar ships sensors to mobility industry customers for testing and commercial use in autonomous vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, mapping, robotics, infrastructure and smart city applications. In February 2023, the company merged with Ouster.
An inertial navigation system is a navigation device that uses motion sensors (accelerometers), rotation sensors (gyroscopes) and a computer to continuously calculate by dead reckoning the position, the orientation, and the velocity of a moving object without the need for external references. Often the inertial sensors are supplemented by a barometric altimeter and sometimes by magnetic sensors (magnetometers) and/or speed measuring devices. INSs are used on mobile robots and on vehicles such as ships, aircraft, submarines, guided missiles, and spacecraft. Older INS systems generally used an inertial platform as their mounting point to the vehicle and the terms are sometimes considered synonymous.
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 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.
Spirit of Berlin was a driverless car developed by the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies. In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.
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.
Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.
