DARPA Urban Challenge

A landmark event in the field of autonomous vehicles has happened.

DARPA has announced the winners of the Urban Challennge.
CMU's robot Boss (seen in the attched picture) has won first place and has been awarded 2M$ !!
Junior from Stanford (Our favorite robot) has arrived at the second place.
Virgina Tech's Victor Tango has taken the third place.

To read more about the Urban Challenge you can visit DARPA's website.

Baby steps and thoughts about programming languages

Today we've met to discuss what should we choose as our main developing platform and
what will be our programming language. A final decision was not yet made but we are inclined to use Microsoft Robotic Studio for the robot control and Roborealm for our vision modules. This means we will need to write (at least most of) our code in .NET compatible language.

Even more important then that (or at least more exciting) is that HANS made a small step towards being autonomous - It moved back and forward :)
Take a look for yourselves

First post

OK. So this is the first post for the Hans project. We will be trying to post updates
and photos when they become available.

Basically, HANS stands for HUJI's Autonomous Navigation System (Just in case you haven't heard HUJI stands for Hebrew University of Jerusalem ;> ). We hope that by the time
we finish working on it (Should be August of 2008) HANS will be worth it's name :)

Our plan is to make a mobile robot (A laptop with a GPS, sonar range detector and a camera residing on top a wheeled platform) that will be able to navigate it's way in the Givat Ram campus. In order to do that we will need to come up with good strategies for road recognition, obstacle avoidance, path planning etc'. As our time (and brain power) is limited we will probably look for simple methods that (hopefully) have been tried before to some extent :)


I'll start you up with a picture of the team opening the box containing the mobile base.
For more pictures you can go to HANS' online photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/yairmov/HANS