Stanford Racing Team's Entry In The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge

Abstract

The Stanford Racing Team (SRT) has successfully developed an autonomous robotic vehicle capable of driving through desert terrain without human intervention. The SRT vehicle Stanley is based on a reinforced Volkswagen Touareg, equipped with a custom drive-by-wire system, a sensor rack, and a computing system. The vehicle is controlled through a distributed software system that uses inertial sensing for pose estimation, and lasers, vision, and RADAR for environmental perception. Sensor data is mapped into a drivability map, which is used to set the direction and velocity of the vehicle. A major emphasis of the SRT has been early development of a prototype end-to-end system, to enable extensive testing in authentic desert terrain.