[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement 01/15

Tue Jan 15 07:46:20 UTC 2008

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:13:14 -0500
To: nsg at marshome.org
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement 01/15
X-Mailer: MessagingEngine.com Webmail Interface
Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>

Meeting notice: The 080115 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  Funny Business with AVs.

For some years now DARPA has been holding "Grand Challenge" contests
focussed on the development of Autonomous Vehicles. In 2006 it announced
that the 2007 GC was going to be located in "a mock urban area."  This
seemed like a natural extension of the first GCs, which had been held in
the middle of nowhere. The contest itself was called the "Urban
Challenge".

Last November 3rd I dialed my browser to the event and was struck at how
un-urban the landscape was.  It was taking place in some California town
with maybe three intersections and a traffic circle. For those of you
familiar with Massachusetts, think Bolton or Webster or Boxford. I would
called it "the Village Challenge". There were not even any pedestrians
(that I saw), let alone motorcyclists or bicyclists or kids on
skateboards or dogs dozing on the road. The vehicles were driving at
maybe twenty miles an hour. It could have been called The 
"Village-on-a-Day-When-Everyone-is-in-Church Challenge."

Last week I went to hear a lecture by Ed Olsen, a member of the team
that built the MIT entry, where I learned that the dumbing down involved
even the list of published specs.  The teams had been told to prepare
for GPS outages; when they arrived DARPA told them there would be none.
They had been told to prepare for sparse waypoints, like 'Begin Here"
and "End Here" with nothing in between. Instead the waypoints were every
few hundred feet, and so on.

Clearly DARPA was bound and determined that at least one entry would
finish. (In the event six of the eleven qualifiers finished.) Why?  I
can think of two explanations. The first is that they see one of their
responsibilities as keeping public interest in the technology high, and
were afraid that if no one finished public support would drift away.

The other has to do with a mandate Congress has in its wisdom passed,
requiring one- third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the
Armed Forces to be unmanned -- which is not quite the same thing as
autonomous, but close -- by 2015, only seven years from now. Clearly
upgrading a third of all the ground combat vehicles in the US defense
fleet with vehicles built around an expensive new technology represents
a huge amount of money.  The last thing the people thinking about
bidding on these contracts want is someone raising their hand and
suggesting that the technology is not ready and that maybe the mandate
ought to be pushed back five years.  Perhaps DARPA saw reason to be
sensitive to these anxieties.

Anyway the MIT entry was massive.  It had six different categories of
senses (odometry, inertial, GPS, lidar, radar, and vision) with many
instances of each (five cameras, sixteen radars, twelve lidars, etc.).
The design philosophy was very sensitive to failure; for instance,
almost all points in the landscape were visible by at least one sensor
in each of the three imaging modes. Getting the sensor fusion and
trajectory planning done quickly enough required 40 CPUs (each quad-
core) and a six kilowatt generator.  The air conditioner that was needed
to keep all the hardware cool covered almost the whole roof.

All this hardware basically did only three things: obstacle detection,
road- edge detection, and lane detection.  Noone listening to Olsen talk
about how hard it was to get even these tasks done would think we were
seven years from a vehicle that could follow a road that was just a
track running through dirt (GPS is certainly a fall-back but Olsen
believes that technology is still too failure-prone to rely on) or
figure out a detour or navigate construction sites or understand hand
signs, especially in locations where clever adversaries were working to
derail the technology.  If the mandate stands, it will be Star Wars all
over again.

When Olsen was finished I asked him what he would like to see in the
next Challenge, figuring he would say something like NASCAR. He said
he would like to run the 07 Challenge again, only without all the
hand-holding.

My two walkaways from the talk are 1) that competent AV engineers think
about failure all the time, and 2) DARPA is corrupt.

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.

                                -- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg'  to
majordomo at polymathy.org.  Unsubs follow the same model.

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
nsg at pobox.com. www.pobox.com/~fhapgood   www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

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