Stanford DARPA Robot Car Capable of 180 Slide Parking

[OspreysGoSWOOP]

http://singularityhub.com/2010...like-a-badass-video/ (http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/12/stanfords-robot-car-slides-into-parking-spot-like-a-badass-video/)

[The_Man]

Holy ****! I can get one of those and show off my cool driving skills. Soon a time will come when car will drive us rather than we driving them.

Till then Drive safe!

[The_Man]

What is that huge thing rotating on top of the car?

Is it the Gyro? Never knew they where so big.

[JeffreyH]

That's a laser distance sensor. I'm not sure what model, but it'll be similar to the Sick Nav200 - we have a bunch of them at work. Most of the ones I'm familiar with have a spinning mirror and lens, that one looks like it spins the whole body of the sensor instead. They're used for localisation and environment sensing.

I had a look over the paper on this a while ago and from memory it're accurately repeatable to 2 feet. Very cool even though it's not perfect yet.

If you're interested, have a look at Ibeo's Team Lux. Personally I'm more impressed by their entry than Stanford's one. They have 3 Ibeo laser sensors integrated into the body of a VW Passat, it looks almost exactly like a normal car yet can drive autonomously. They also use minimal computing power compared to many entries, which have 20 odd computers onboard.