“Dora” is the world’s first fully-autonomous (no human driver and no remote control) vehicle driven by Apple Computer’s Mac OS X. The entire development and race management efforts at Team Banzai is being done using Apple Mac OS X technology. As the Team Banzai website reads, “all Macs… all the time.”
Team Banzai is one of only 40 teams from around the country to advance by invitation to the national semi-finals of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Selected from a field of almost 200 teams that applied and competed through earlier regional elimination rounds, Team Banzai is proud to be participating in this exciting head-to-head competition in an attempt to win $2 million.
More info, “driven by Mac OS X” web badge, and pictures here.
[Update: 4:25pm EDT: After extensive review, the headline “World’s first fully-autonomous (no human driver, no remote control) vehicle driven by Apple Mac OS X” will remain unchanged due to the fact that the article is about the “world’s first fully-autonomous (no human driver, no remote control) vehicle driven by Apple Mac OS X.” Thank you.]
[Update: 4:33pm EDT: After even more extensive review, the headline “World’s first fully-autonomous (no human driver, no remote control) vehicle driven by Apple Mac OS X” has been changed to “Meet Dora: world’s 1st fully-autonomous Apple Mac OS X vehicle (no human driver, no remote control)” for mysterious reasons which we will probably never fully explain. Thank you.]
[Update: 4:50pm EDT: After massively extensive review, the headline “World’s first fully-autonomous (no human driver, no remote control) vehicle driven by Apple Mac OS X” that was changed to “Meet Dora: world’s 1st fully-autonomous Apple Mac OS X vehicle (no human driver, no remote control)” has now been changed to “Vehicle drives itself (no human driver and no remote control) thanks to Apple’s Mac OS X” for reasons even we don’t fully understand. Thank you.]
Give me your secrets…
i will divulge all to the Llama
MW=eyes: as in; my eyes see your info;
linuxlover:
“The fact that there is a discussion page on Wikipedia means that even more info/POV can be found on Wikipedia than other encyclopedias”
The point is that it’s not written or fact-checked by experts or even researchers, but instead by consensus of the ignorant masses. So for a while, I was next to be the president, and I could be again today. It wasn’t vandalism, it was my idea of the right info. If I made a less obvious change, it could live there forever and ever.
whatever, my ipod has been driving my car no problem for the past 6 months.
PC Apologist,
Wikipedia considers the change you made to be vandalism – read their “vandalism” article to learn more. As I recall they corrected your submission within something like 6 minutes – not bad for a bunch of ignorant folklorists eh.
I admit that Wikipedia’s open structure allows people like you to damage information on the site. But, the benefits of opening the encyclopedic process to everyone far outweigh the negatives…IMHO.
If you don’t like Wikipedia, then don’t go there.
Regards,
Linuxlover
Nie!
A posting has been made on the DARPA Grand Challenge forum about this article and the humorous permutations of the title. I’m sure that the meaning is now completely clear, no matter what further changes have been made since the last time I checked it!
Congrats to Team Banzai for getting invited to the NQE! However, the article is a bit misleading since there were no “regional” competitions, instead there were 100+ teams who received site visits and forty of those were given invitations to the NQE. Twenty vehicles will be selected from all of the vehicles at the NQE (both semifinalists and alternates to be announced).
No one here has posted yet about the incredibly difficult feat of turning a vehicle into an autonomous robot. Imagine the most difficult mental challenge you’ve ever solved and multiply by about 100. Now try to make your solution smart enough and reliable enough to survive a trip through a narrow travel corridor, sometimes only a bit wider than your vehicle, laid out over an obstacle course of about 150 miles. If your vehicle strays outside the travel corridor, then the best that could happen is that it could get disqualified. The worst that could happen would be that it could drive off of a cliff, smack into boulders , get wrapped in barbed wire fences etc.
If anyone is interested in looking at the websites of the other teams, they’d find that many of the other Grand Challenge vehicles are also “driven” by UNIX type systems, ie, Linux, RT-Linux, QNX. I might have seen a FreeBSD reference in the past but don’t recall the specifics.
As long as the OS doesn’t get in the way of getting data to/from the sensors and actuator interfaces then the OS doesn’t matter; the actual code will usually be C or C++ or similar (One vehicle may have run mostly on Perl code last year, but I’m pretty sure that was on Linux not OS X).
The teams who have made it this far, like Team Banzai, deserve congratulations and support. There’s a good chance that someone could win the Grand Challenge this year so check out http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge to see the latest news and forum postings etc.
LOL looks like the Mac OSX powered Dora couldn’t even get off to a good start, cleared only 6 out of 50 gates.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/10/08/state/n144441D60.DTL
http://www.grandchallenge.org/