(9 August 2007) TeamUCF was offered an invitation to participate in the DARPA Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) to be conducted October 26-31, 2007 in Victorville, California ... essentially the Urban Challenge semi-finals. According to DARPA, this invitation was provided as a result of "your team's hard work [that] clearly showed during the site visit and in your technical paper." TeamUCF has accepted this invitation and looks forward to even more challenging scenarios to be presented at the NQE course. Work continues on the Knight Rider vehicle to fine tune performance on a course which is expected to be substantially less well-defined than the site visit course and contained many more stationary and moving obstacles (specifically other autonomous vehicles), although the vehicle has successfully completed all missions we expect to encounter.

(20 June 2007) TeamUCF successfully completed its DARPA Urban Challenge Site Visit today. The visit was the first chance for DARPA to see TeamUCF's Knight Rider VIP vehicle in action, testing the vehicle's autonomous navigation capability and traffic detection and avoidance capability on a closed course at UCF. Testing began at 8 AM local time in hopes of avoiding some of the Florida heat ... which it did not. A series of navigation runs tested the vehicle's ability to autonomously navigate the course which consisted of tight 90 degree turns, s-turns through concrete obstacles, stop sign performance, and 3pt turn performance.

One picture of the team after the successful site visit.

The meeting on Monday, July 17th attracted approximately 20 faculty, students and external observers. Following the meeting's purpose to illustrate the next development steps in each of the subareas (V=Vision, I=Intelligence and P=Planning), four speakers had the chance to talk in 5 - 10 minutes about their area.

Dr. Niels Lobo detailed the proposed vision infrastructure on "Knight Rider V.I.P.", Remo Pillat talked about the Intelligence part and Ricky, one of Dr. Qu's students, outlined the general idea behind the path planning for the robot. Don Harper, speaking as leading System's Engineer, rounded the meeting off.

We have successfully submitted our Track-A Proposal after many weeks of diligent work by various team members.

Video

A meeting was held today to determine the level of interest in TeamUCF pursuing an entry in the 2006 DARPA Urban Challenge. Various team members from last years effort plus a large number of faculty were in attendance. The outcome was very positive that we should vigorously pursue this years challenge. The I2Lab agreed to act as an umbrella organization to bring together this multi-disciplinary project.