Team Description* |
MIT's Grand Challenge team is led by four co-principal
investigators: John Leonard from the Dept. of Mechanical
Engineering, Jonathan How from the Dept. of Aeronautics
and Astronautics, Seth Teller from the Dept. of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and David
Barrett of Olin College. The team also includes a
number of other faculty and students from MIT, a group
of engineers from the C.S. Draper Laboratory, and a team
of undergraduates from Olin College. The MIT team
believes that the difficulty of the DARPA Grand
Challenge arises principally from three types of
uncertainty inherent in the autonomous urban driving
task: in the input, i.e., the relationship of the
provided environment and mission descriptions to the
actual driving environment; in sensing, i.e., the
relationship of available sensor data to the actual
static and dynamic surroundings of the vehicle; and in
actuation, i.e., the relationship between commanded
vehicle motions and the vehicle's actual physical
progress. In the absence of any uncertainty, meeting the
challenge would be a straightforward engineering
exercise, albeit a very complex one. Yet such
uncertainty is unavoidable in reality; recognizing this
fact, and developing strategies to account for
uncertainty, are the keys to a successful DGC effort.
Our team's central, and distinctive, focus is addressing
the above sources of uncertainty in a way that is both
scalable to spatially extended environments, and
efficient enough for real-time on-board operation in a
dynamic world. |
