Thursday, March 22, 2007

Mini-Grand Challenge, sort of...

So now it's official: we (a team led by Simon) will build a demonstrator model car with onboard computer control, and organize the first model car competitions at WCCI 2008. The IDEA is that a smaller car faces the same problems of navigation, control, computer vision etc. as a full-size car does, but is enormously cheaper to build. So it's like a miniature version of the DARPA Grand Challenge, that anyone can participate in. Of course, this makes it possible to try some riskier approaches, that you would never dare try with a full-size car, such as various machine learning techniques. We hope we will see lots of innovative entrants to the competition.

2 comments:

mirko said...

great!
could you please elaborate more on details such as, for example, min/max size, eventual constraints (e.g. budget) to be respected, etc ... ?
bye!

Julian Togelius said...

Hi Mirko,

Unfortunately, I really don't have much in the way of details at the moment. The demonstrator car is very much under development, and no competition rules have been set. We plan to work more on the car during the summer, and there will definitely by something to report by September, when Simon demonstrates the car on CEC in Singapore.