Buy An Urban Challenge Car!

[Markus Waibel]

The base of the autonomous car "Odin", which placed third in last year's Urban Challenge and beat the Cornell Racing Team featured in our last podcast, is now for sale. Buying the fully Drive-By-Wire Ford Hybrid Escape platform, minus the LIDAR sensors and AI that were used in the competition, will put you back a hefty $89'000.

For more information on Odin: http://www.me.vt.edu/urbanchallenge/Vehicle.htm
Spend your money here: http://www.torctech.com/?q=node/29

[Johnny 5]

That's actually great news, because TORC endorses and actively promotes the open architecture JAUS (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems). This means that if we are lucky - and JAUS becomes a standard - our cars will soon be able to talk to each other!

Team VictorTango's autonomous robot-car

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[Johnny 5]

... and if we are not so lucky, and we don't get an open standard then "Team Gray"'s system (http://www.graymatterinc.com) wouldn't be so bad either.

Autonomous car robot in a box

Autonomous_Vehicle_System_AVS.jpg (31.71 KiB) Viewed 12752 times

They've been a bit quiet lately - anybody know what's up with them?