Stanley: The Robot That Won The DARPA Grand Challenge Sebastian Thrun, Mike Montemerlo, Hendrik Dahlkamp, David Stavens, Andrei Aron, James Diebel, Philip Fong, John Gale, Morgan Halpenny, Gabriel Hoffmann, Kenny Lau, Celia Oakley, Mark Palatucci, Vaughan Pratt, Pascal Stang, Sven Strohband, Cedric Dupont, Lars-Erik Jendrossek, Christian Koelen, Charles Markey, Carlo Rummel, Joe van Niekerk, Eric Jensen, Philippe Alessandrini, Gary Bradski, Bob Davies, Scott Ettinger, Adrian Kaehler, Ara Nefian, and Pamela Mahoney

Please see the research page for details on other projects.

Abstract— This article describes the robot Stanley, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.  Stanley was developed for high-speed desert driving without human intervention. The robot's software system relied predominately on state-of-the-art AI technologies, such as machine learning and probabilistic reasoning. This article describes the major components of this architecture, and discusses the results of the Grand Challenge race.

This paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Field Robotics.

Further information may be found at the Stanford Racing Team Homepage.

I worked on the initial trajectory planner, which takes the DARPA-specified waypoints and generates a smooth navigable trajectory that serves as the baseline path for the vehicle.  This is discussed in Section 8 of the article.
 

Paper: Journal of Field Robotics [PDF] [Bibtex].

6/28/2006