The DARPA Grand Challenge: overview of the Virginia Tech vehicle and experience

The DARPA Grand Challenge might be the greatest and most heralded control systems problem ever posed. The challenge was to build an autonomous vehicle that could navigate from Barstow, CA to Prim, NV, across hundreds of miles of rugged desert terrain. To win the million-dollar cash prize being offered by DARPA, the vehicle was required to traverse the course in less than ten hours with no operator intervention. Although no team came close to completing the course, the Grand Challenge opened a new era in unmanned ground vehicle navigation. From a field of more than one hundred entries, Virginia Tech was one of the fifteen teams to qualify for the final event and one of only seven teams to complete the entire pre-race qualifying course.