Paul J. Perrone has written numerous books and articles on various Java-based software technologies. He has also founded Perrone Robotics fusing open and standard software technologies with the field of robotics. He has helped push robotics into the mainstream and brought the term "popular robotics" into the public eye.
In addition to robotics software for personal and professional use. Perrone was the team lead for Team Jefferson, a 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge team, and a DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) team.
He has been a frequent presenter at Sun Microsystem's JavaOne conference, namely James Gosling's keynote sessions presenting an autonomous dune buggy (Tommy), an unmanned helicopter , an autonomous Scion Xb (Tommy Jr) , and Lincvolt, an energy-efficient vehicle owned and spearheaded by rock star Neil Young. He received a Duke Award for Tommy, and a Golden Duke and Lifetime Achievement Award for Lincvolt .
He is featured in a documentary about a robotic car entered into the historic 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and was featured in a Discovery Science special called "RoboCars" for his robotic car entered into the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge .
In 2010, he was also one of 25 individuals living in Charlottesville, Virginia who are well regarded in their respective fields .
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The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a leading private school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. U.S. News & World Report currently ranks the graduate program as tied for 1st 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 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 extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The most recent Challenge, the 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots.
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 the 2 million dollar prize.
Sebastian Thrun is an entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist from Germany. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
Red Whittaker is a roboticist and research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He led Tartan Racing to its first-place victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) Urban Challenge and brought Carnegie Mellon University the two million dollar prize. Previously, Whittaker also competed for the DARPA Grand Challenge placing second and third place simultaneously, in the Grand Challenge Races.
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.
Perrone Robotics is a robotics software company based out of Crozet, Virginia and formed in 2001. The company formed Team Jefferson as a low budget side project in 2004 to build an autonomous robotic dune buggy for participation in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The company was at the 2006 JavaOne conference with their robotic dune buggy 'Tommy' and received a Duke Award in the emerging technology category for Tommy & MAX.
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.
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 Robocars series.
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Velodyne Lidar is a Silicon Valley-based lidar technology company spun off from Velodyne Acoustics. As of August 2016, the company worked with 25 self-driving car programs. Velodyne Lidar ships sensors to mobility industry customers for testing and commercial use.
The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) is a not-for-profit research institute of the State University System of Florida, with locations in Pensacola and Ocala, Florida. IHMC scientists and engineers investigate a broad range of topics related to building technological systems aimed at amplifying and extending human cognitive, physical and perceptual capacities. These include artificial intelligence, robotics, human-centered computing, agile and distributed computing and many related areas.
LincVolt is a 1959 Lincoln Continental, owned by musician Neil Young, that was converted into a more fuel-efficient, hybrid demonstrator vehicle.
Willow Garage was a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company was most likely best known for its open source software suite ROS, which has been rapidly and widely becoming a common, standard tool among robotics researchers and industry, since its initial release in 2010. It was started in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, who had worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to develop the technology that became the Google Search engine. Steve Cousins was the president and CEO. Willow Garage was located in Menlo Park, California.
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 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a prize competition funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Held from 2012 to 2015, it aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments." The DRC followed the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge. It began in October 2012 and was to run for about 33 months with three competitions: a Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) that took place in June 2013; and two live hardware challenges, the DRC Trials in December 2013 and the DRC Finals in June 2015.
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Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. He is known for advancing the field of autonomous vehicles. 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), a subsidiary of Daimler Trucks, is an American autonomous vehicle company headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia. Torc produces unmanned and autonomous technology that retrofits to existing machinery and vehicles. Its custom products, software and automation kits have been used on vehicles in several industries, including military, mining agriculture, and automotive over the last decade.
Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company founded in 2017 to develop self-driving technology. Urmson has been instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.