Victorville (CA) – With the DARPA Urban Challenge race just a few hours away, some teams are still patching together their cars for a potential destruction derby with other robotic vehicles.  Using pieces of cardboard, a pair of house fans and a lot of creativity, the Ben Franklin Racing Team from the Pennsylvania thinks they are ready to take on the competition’s more well-funded competitors.  Team member Jonathan Bohren told us some of the “low tech” secrets that the team used in their robotic Toyota Prius.

Video interview with Ben Franklin Racing Team

The trunk of the car stands out because it has more than half-a-dozen Macintosh Mini computers that are networked together with plain-vanilla Netgear switches.  A Netgear firewall blocks UDP packets from reaching the sensors because Bohren told us, “Those packets can disable some devices.”  Money  and time played a big part in choosing regular off-the-shelf components and Bohren said it was easy to replace broken equipment by going to the local computer store.

The Mac Minis run the “Feisty Fawn” version of Ubuntu Linux and a failover unit is in the rack to take over, just in case one of the Macs dies.  The whole setup eats up less than a kilowatt of electricity and of course you need to dissipate all that heat coming in from the sun.  Bohren said the team found two simple and very inexpensive solutions from the local hardware store.  One was to put space blankets on the inside of the back windows to block out the sun's rays and the other was to aim two regular house fans at the computer rack.  “It worked surprisingly well,” Bohren added.

Like other cars, Ben Franklin is using a mix of spinning laser and scanning laser units.  The team has found an ingenious use for surplus cardboard by attaching pieces to the front bumper as a failover sensor object for the front corner laser units.  You see if the vehicle hits another bot or a wall, the laser units could come loose, but really the computers can’t distinguish data coming from an attached unit or one that is hanging on by a few wires.  So the team has the laser units constantly scanning the cardboard, and if the cardboard isn’t there then the navigation software assumes something is wrong and ignores all the data coming from that laser.

The DARPA Urban Challenge race starts tomorrow at 7AM Pacific and TG Daily will bring you up to date reports, video and pictures from the historic race.

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