About Prospect 11 and
Prospect 11 is the team name for
Throughout the design, build and
test process the guiding objectives have been academic relevance, simplicity,
elegance and minimal expenditure of funds.
Academic relevance because it is
During the summer of 2004, a team of to-be Seniors from the class of 2005 did the original ground work for Prospect 11. Ben Klaber’05 ORFE, Ben Essenberg’05 MAE, Joel Mancl’05 MAE, Trevor Brooks’05 CS, Philip Wei ’05 CS, Daniel Chiou’05 ELE, Michael Pasqual ’05 ELE, Each of these students went on to use their participation in the DARPA Project as an application basis for their Senior Thesis. Professor Kornhauser obtained, with the help of Rick Spina ’85, a salvaged vehicle from General Motors. Trimble Navigation and ALK Technologies donated GPS receivers. Otherwise, all student summer salaries and other equipment was purchased using the endowment funds from the CSX Transportation Research Fund and the Lion Transportation Senior Thesis Fund.
During the 2004-05 academic year, the participating seniors were joined by several underclassmen. Brian Cattle ‘07 ELE and Anand Atreya’07 ELE actively participated as part of independent research activity. Freshmen Andrew Saxe ’08, Gordon Franken ’08, Josh Herbach’08 and Brendan Collins’08 joined on an extra-curricular basis. The faculty advising team, led by Professor Alain Kornhauser (ORFE), included Professors Stuart Schwartz (ELE), Bradley Dickenson (ELE), Sanjeev Kulkarni (ELE), Michael Littman (MAE), Clarance Rowley (MAE), Daniel Osherson (PSY), and Szymon Rusinkiewicz (CS).
Culmination of a year’s activity
took place with the original DARPA Site Visit on
It was an enormous accomplishment
for the Prospect 11 team to, in one year, properly modify a production vehicle
that could autonomously control its throttle, brake and steering utilizing
inputs from a GPS receiver, roof mounted camera, digital compass and stock
sensors such as wheel ticks and throttle settings. All was accomplished under the
During the Site Visit, the first run was brought to an emergency stop immediately after Prospect 11 failed to avoid the first obstacle. It was unfortunate that the emergency stop was activated, because, as was subsequently learned, it was also important to determine if the vehicle would stay within the prescribed boundaries, irrespective of its ability to avoid obstacles. More points could have been earned by completing the run. During the second run, Prospect 11, successfully avoided the first obstacle, “nicked” the second obstacle and completed the course in a very fast time of 56 seconds without violating the course boundaries. The third run had Prospect 11 nicking the first obstacle, running right over the second and quickly completing the course once again without violating the course boundaries. Thus, the results were mixed. On the positive side, the automated throttle, brake and steering systems were well integrated with GPS, machine vision and other sensors. Unfortunately, Prospect 11 had serious problems with obstacle detection and tracking which resulted in its poor performance in collision avoidance.
When the top 40 Semi-finalists were announced in early June, Prospect 11 was not included; however, it did come very close. So close, that upon further consideration, DARPA decided to offer the Prospect 11 team “Alternate” status.
The Alternate status provides
Prospect 11 a second chance Site
Visit, scheduled for
A team of seven (7) students, advised by Prof. Kornhauser, have been working since May as summer research assistants, funded by the CSX Transportation Research Fund. Students are Scott Schiffres ’06 MAE, Kamil Choudhury’06 CS, Brian Cattle ‘07 ELE, Anand Atreya’07 ELE, Andrew Saxe ’08, Gordon Franken ’08, , and Brendan Collins’08. These students have completely rebuilt Prospect 11. They have rugged zed the throttle, braking and steering systems, shock-mounted the computers, redid all of the wiring, installed a stereo vision system for object detection and identification and rewrote the longitudinal and lateral control functions. In pre-site visit tests, Prospect 11 has been able to detect objects, avoid them and stay within prescribed courses most of the time. Some problems still exist. Not all bugs are out of the code; however, performance is promising. Prospect 11 has been able to successfully negotiate a 1000 meter long closed course several times without incident. Unfortunately, each attempt has ended with some type of computer crash. Enormous additional progress has been made; however, reliability is still a serious issue.
Prof. Alain L. Kornhauser