No one believed that Princeton students would want to get dirt under their fingers, ORFE professor Alain Kornhauser GS '71 said at the beginning of a presentation on Wednesday about a project that proved such skepticism was undeserved.
During "Prospect 11: The Making, Testing and Running of Princeton's Entry in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge," Kornhauser and his team of student engineers shared their experiences competing in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge.
DARPA, a division of the Department of Defense, created the challenge as part of a project to design autonomous ground vehicles that could help save lives in warfare. Entries had to cross an obstacle course set up in Nevada's Mojave Desert.
The Princeton team decided to enter the competition in May 2004. DARPA had held its first Challenge, in which no entry managed to complete the course, only a few months earlier.
The team dubbed its entry — a salvaged silver Canyon donated by General Motors — the "Prospect 11."
A DARPA team first came to Princeton to evaluate the vehicle in May. Prospect 11 did not make the top 40 entries, and it was designated an alternate for the next round of competition.
A second site visit came in August. This time, Prospect 11 advanced to the National Qualifying Event. The team qualified for the final round, where it finished in tenth place, malfunctioning after nine miles due to a computer glitch.
Team member Anand Atreya '07 explained the malfunction. The car's computer, he said, was programmed to list all obstacles of concern and then remove the obstacle once a distance of 20 feet had been exceeded. At the nine-mile mark, however, the computer was "still processing a bush it saw toward the beginning of the course."
The winning entry was submitted by a team from Stanford.
"All Stanford had to do was build lasers and build a little bit of code," Kornhauser said, whereas Princeton's team had to do everything itself.
The team left Prospect 11 in Nevada after the Challenge, but returned during fall break to test the car's performance on other courses.
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