"It quickly becomes your life," Brendan Collins '08 says, leaning against a silver GMC Canyon pickup with a life of its own.
It's Friday afternoon in a small, well-lit garage on the southwest edge of the E-Quad, and Collins — along with colleagues Scott Schiffres '06, Bryan Cattle '07 and Anand Atreya '07 — is busily putting the finishing touches on the vehicular monster he and his team have fashioned: a completely autonomous 4-wheel-drive truck dubbed the "Prospect 11."
The vehicle, which can navigate without a driver or remote control, is on its way to Fontana, Calif., this week to compete in the semifinals of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge. The contest was created at the behest of Congress and the Department of Defense to accelerate research in unmanned ground vehicles that could one day be used on the battlefield.
Prospect 11 was one of 43 autonomous vehicles out of more than 100 applicants to survive elimination cuts, qualifying for the semifinals held Sept. 28 through Oct. 6 at the California Speedway.
The finals will be held Oct. 8, with the top 20 vehicles attempting to complete a 150-mile course in the desert Southwest featuring natural and manmade obstacles.
DARPA is offering a $2 million grand prize to the team that designs the unmanned vehicle that completes the course the fastest within 10 hours.
"We've all been stressed out to a degree because it's such a large project," Gordon Franken '08 said.
Franken, along with Kamil Choudhury '06 and Andrew Saxe '08, is one of seven Princeton students who spent their summer and much of the last two weeks designing the vehicle.
Josh Herbach '08, who worked on the project extensively last year, will join his seven teammates in California.
"If it's not something like eating, sleeping or going to class, we've been here in the garage," Franken added.
As their deadline loomed last Friday, students paced around this gadget-filled second home, preparing to install a new GPS system in the pickup and exchanging engineering and computer jargon that would make sense in few places but an Ivy League garage.
On the north wall of the room, a window had been converted into the group's makeshift drawing board. Here, students had used markers to compose wiring diagrams, write computer code and even hash out a preliminary "DARPA soundtrack," complete with "Eye of the Tiger" and "Viva Las Vegas."
"The best thing about being involved with this," Collins said, taking a brief break from the project, "is that I'm able to tackle some hard problems in a meaningful way."
Under the hood
The problem posed by the DARPA Grand Challenge is essentially one of control. Once the competition begins, engineers will be at the mercy of the codes they wrote and the technology they designed, unable to manipulate the vehicle in any way.
"The truck has to be able to perform irrespective of what's thrown at it, and it's going to have to figure it out," said operations research and financial engineering professor Alain Kornhauser GS '71, who has been advising the project. "That's what makes this really hard, the uncertainty of what it will have to in fact withstand."
Prior to the competition, DARPA provides each autonomous vehicle's computer with a rough set of coordinates — similar to a trail of bread crumbs — that informs the car of the general direction in which it needs to travel.
But since teams do not know what obstacles may lie between two given points, they are forced to design their vehicles accordingly.
The Prospect 11 features state-of-the-art GPS tracking that pinpoints the pickup's position to within 5 cm. of its actual location, as well as two onboard computers, four cameras and innumerable cords and wires.
The four cameras, mounted on the hood of the vehicle, scan the terrain in front of the truck and transmit the data to the computers situated in the pickup's rear seating area. There, one computer processes the information while another sends signals to motors controlling the truck's accelerator and steering wheel.
Since data is being transmitted many times per second, the pickup can, in theory, avoid obstacles, negotiate turns and vary its speed between 10 and 40 miles per hour.
"It's not as if you get a homework question where you're given an input and all you have to do is slog through all of the formulas to get an output," Kornhauser said. "There's real-world Mother Nature associated with this."
History of the project
Though the DARPA challenge is in its second year, this is the first time a Princeton team has entered the competition. In 2004, DARPA offered a $1 million prize to the team whose vehicle could complete the course the fastest, but no vehicle was able to finish more than seven miles of the over-150-mile route.
This failure, coupled with the announcement of a second competition, prompted a group of undergraduates led by Ben Klaber '05 to approach Kornhauser about starting a Princeton project.
"They were able to convince me that it was their idea and they were going to do it," Kornhauser said. "My philosophy is that it had to be the students' ideas and the students' project. Once they decided they wanted to do it, I volunteered to help facilitate it for them in whatever way I could."
It has been this insistence on approaching DARPA from a purely academic standpoint — throwing undergraduate brain power at the problems posed instead of large sums of money — that has distinguished Princeton's team from those of engineering Goliaths like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. At those schools, the efforts have benefited from outside funding and human resources, Princeton group members said.
"Ultimately, this is an undergraduate problem and all the work that was done on this car was done by undergraduates," Collins said.
"I think the whole E-Quad is involved in this project," Schiffres added.
General Motors donated the Canyon pickup to the Princeton team because its windshield was originally damaged in transport, while Trimble Navigation and ALK Technologies provided the group with GPS receivers, members said.
The Prospect 11 vehicle — so named because engineers once joked that such a truck could drive students home after completing the famed drinking feat, and because the title evokes Apollo 11 — has cost the group around $30,000, Franken said.
Life lessons
Whether the pickup glides blindly through a Southwestern desert to a first place finish or veers dangerously off course and has to be immediately shut down by DARPA organizers, the engineers said the work has been its own reward.
"If you look at the classes in the engineering school, they are all here to prepare you for the real world," Franken said. "The difference with this project is that this is all of us applying all that we learned in the real world right now."
Schiffres envisions a world in which autonomous vehicle technology is quite possibly the norm. "I think it would be awesome someday if cars drive themselves down the highway and [we can] just punch in an address," he said.
For Kornhauser, though, the project has always been more about student learning than technological advancement.
"I've enjoyed a lot of things with Princeton students, but this has been number one," Kornhauser said.
"The enthusiasm, the hard work, the level of achievement; and they're the ones who've done it," he said. "We've already won. The students have gotten a lot of academic benefit out of this, so the rest is gravy."
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