This is the second in a series of monthly progress reports.

We're moving from design and discussion to metalworking and coding. We now have a shop.

Our goal for the end of the summer is to have the vehicle running around as a teleoperator, with the actuators running the vehicle and many of the sensors running.

On the laser rangefinder front, we're going to do as well as we can with an off-the-shelf SICK unit, while pursuing some other options. We could run the Grand Challenge course on the SICK unit alone, but we will have to go slowly on anything but a flat road, with occasional slowdowns whenever the line scanner misses something. But we can debug all the software while continuing to work on the rangefinder problem.

People

We are losing John Pierre at the end of the summer. He's going back to MIT to get an MBA. But his road follower is coming along well, and we expect that we will be able to use it. He'll still be available for some consultation remotely.

We've started recruiting Stanford students for the summer. An arrangement has been worked out with Prof. Dennis Allison by which they get academic credit. We have three Stanford students interested so far, and may have one or two more.

Subsystems

Vehicle

We've had the Polaris Ranger for a few weeks now, and it's a nice vehicle. We've had it out in rough country in San Jose, and it works fine. No major problems there.

We still need to mount an auxiliary generator on the vehicle, probably a 3KW unit. The Polaris Ranger power system is very limited. It's just barely enough to run the vehicle itself.

Workspace

We've moved into our new shop, at 2862 Middlefield Road, Unit N, Redwood City, California. We have 1600 square feet of space, plus a big fenced yard for testing. We have tools, computers, and our vehicle. Celia's breadboarded steering actuator setup is working there. Furniture will be delivered tomorrow. We have a few more days of setup, but should be fully operational there by the weekend.

Sensors

Radars

TheEaton VORAD radars now work under QNX.

Laser rangefinders

We've ordered a SICK 180° line scanner with a 45 meter range, and are negotiating to buy a high-performance pan/tilt head for this 10Kg device. We may be able to get adequate performance from this device by active servoing of the pan/tilt head to keep it pointed properly. It's just barely good enough for 40MPH driving on a flat road, but it might do the job.

Acuity Research has run into an organizational problem - the parent company has decided to close down the Menlo Park operation. So we can no longer rely on them as a supplier. This is the fifth scanning laser rangefinder company to exit that business. (The others, for reference, were ERIM, Schwartz Electro-Optic, Leica, and General Dynamics Robotics).

We've talked with Electro-Optical Systems, which builds laser rangefinder component boards. We've convinced them to try to build a faster unit than they've built before, one we could use with a rotating prism scanner to make a multiline scanner. They expect to have prototypes in September or October. So we may be able to improve performance this winter. This, though, is a high risk item.

Looking ahead, we're exploring the possibility of a new type of laser rangefinder with some Stanford professors. But that's not likely to be useful for the 2004 event. 2005, though...

GPS/inertial/compass system

This is looking more like a buy than a build. We're recruiting a graduating student from Stanford who's worked on such systems.

Other sensors

We need several short-range ranging sensors (sonar or microwave) spaced around the vehicle. We hope to turn that problem over to one of the summer students.

We've ordered a Dickey-John radar speedometer (a downward-looking Doppler radar device), but it has not arrived yet.

We still need tachometer sensors on the engine and driveshaft. We also need water sensors to detect entry into water, and to detect when it's getting too deep. The main problem is interfacing all these devices without creating a mess or an oversize PC/104 board stack.

Steering position sensing has been a huge headache, because most of the steering position sensors can't handle enough turns for the Polaris (which is about four turns lock to lock.) But we've found the technical specs for the steering sensor used in GM cars, which can't sense for that whole range, but can mechanically handle it. We only need the steering sensor to find the steering wheel home position after a reset; after that, the motor encoder does the work.

Actuators

We have four proportional actuators in the chassis (steering, throttle, brake, and shift), plus a solenoid for the choke. We're currently planning to use Faulhaber controllers for the motors; they make some small sealed units which daisy-chain, so we can have one near each motor and can control them all from one serial port. This simplifies things considerably, although we do have to spend about $500 per motor for that capability. It's worth it to go with high-quality components here; we have no redundancy in actuators.

Onboard computers

Current plans call for three small PC/104 machines (one for the chassis, one for auxiliary sensors, and one for the top unit), plus two larger rackmount machines in the back. We're about to buy the first PC/104 machine as a development kit.

Early layouts resulted in too many PC/104 boards with too many inputs going into one box. The daisy-chained controllers make the wiring problems much more manageable.

Software

Road following

John Pierre is making good progress in implementing a RALPH-type road follower (the approach used with the CMU "hands off across America" project), and expects to be testing against video data within two weeks.

John Nagle has a QNX driver for FireWire cameras, and another for the VORAD radar, working

Work has started on a very simple message system for encapsulating interprocess messages with C++ classes, and on the "watchdog" program which starts all the other programs and gets them communicating.

Groundside systems

Bruce Baumgart has set up our shop computers.

Adminstration

We now have insurance coverage for the shop, but we don't have proper coverage for field testing. For the race itself, DARPA assumes liability. We need to discuss this further with our insurance broker.

Our landlord wants us to have an inspection by the fire marshall. We have to comply with the fire code. Our flammable liquid storage cabinet comes tomorrow. We have three fire extinguishers. We need to do a few other things. But we should get approval.