Princeton makes cut in Pentagon’s robotic car competition

Here is a CNET report on the lat­est break­ing news in the Pentagon’s urban grand challenge:

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said Fri­day that it has whit­tled down the con­tes­tants for its upcom­ing urban robot race from 89 to 53 teams via qual­i­fi­ca­tion events,” writes CNET’s Ste­fanie Olsen. “Among the 53 teams are the Stan­ford Rac­ing team (win­ner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge–a desert robot race across 132 miles), Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity and Team MIT.”

For more indepth cov­er­age of the Prince­ton team’s stereo-vision strat­egy, see Kevin Coughlin’s report in the Star-Ledger.

“The biggest chal­lenge is the sys­tem integration–getting every­thing to work together,” Prince­ton team spokesman Gor­don Franken tells Cough­lin. “Over the past sev­eral weeks, we’ve been mak­ing progress towards that. Now that it’s for real, we have to buckle down and speed up our development.”

Photo: Frank Wojciechowski