Autonomous Off-Road Driving in the DARPA Grand Challenge

Eagle Jones, Brian Fulkerson, Emilio Frazzoli, Deepak Kumar, Robert Walters, Jim Radford, and Richard Mason

Abstract:	The Golem Group/UCLA team was a finalist in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and traveled 22 miles on race day. The Golem Group was also one of the most successful teams in the 2004 Grand Challenge, traveling 5.2 miles on a shoestring budget. We present the strategies, challenges, outcomes, and lessons learned from two years of autonomous vehicle development. Autonomous navigation in the off road environment is a challenging problem, which requires the successful integration of many different sensors and systems. We discuss the integration of GPS, IMU, and odometry together with various models for vehicle dynamics. In particular, we find it useful to incorporate the non-holonomic property of the ground vehicle, but also point out situations in which this constraint is violated and how to compensate. We also explore our approach to selection of quantities to use for control, taking into account which pieces of the system are most sensitive to errors in position and pose estimates. Finally, we address the performance of our system, and future possibilities for improvement.
Published in:	Proceedings of IEEE/ION PLANS 2006 April 25 - 27, 2006 Loews Coronado Resort Hotel San Diego, CA
Pages:	366 - 371
Cite this article:	Jones, Eagle, Fulkerson, Brian, Frazzoli, Emilio, Kumar, Deepak, Walters, Robert, Radford, Jim, Mason, Richard, "Autonomous Off-Road Driving in the DARPA Grand Challenge," Proceedings of IEEE/ION PLANS 2006, San Diego, CA, April 2006, pp. 366-371. https://doi.org/10.1109/PLANS.2006.1650624
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