DARPA Urban Challenge : Autonomous Vehicles in City Traffic

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across diverse research areas and scientific disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neurosciences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are proving an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the field of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. The goal of the series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field.

This volume, edited by Martin Buehler, Karl Iagnemma and Sanjiv Singh, presents a unique and comprehensive collection of the scientific results obtained by finalist teams that participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge in November 2007, in the mock city environment of the George Air Force base in Victorville, California. This book is the companion of a previous volume by the same editors which was devoted to the Grand Challenge, which took place in the Nevada desert during October 2005, and was the second in the series of autonomous vehicle races sponsored by DARPA.

The Urban Challenge demonstrated how cutting-edge perception, control, and motion planning techniques can allow intelligent autonomous vehicles not only to travel significant distances in off-road terrain, but also to operate in urban scenarios. Beyond the value for future military applications--which motivated DARPA to sponsor the race--the expected impact in the commercial sector for automotive manufacturers is equally, if not more, important: autonomous sensing and control constitute key technologies for vehicles of the future, and might help save thousands of lives that are now lost in traffic accidents.

As with the previous STAR volume, the original papers collected in this book were initially published in special issues of the Journal of Field Robotics. Our series is proud to collect them in an archival publication as a special STAR volume!