Carnegie Mellon University’s Tartan Racing team plans to roll out a leaner and meaner successor to its driverless Boss SUV by the end of the year.
The team’s first Boss won DARPA’s 2007 Urban Challenge, which pitted autonomous autos against the other person in a race through simulated city traffic. Tartan is already choosing the model and make of the vehicle that will carry all sorts of the latestlasers and cameras, and other gizmos needed to navigate the world without having a human inside the cockpit.
Boss 2 will serve as the test bed for several new autonomous driving technologies, says Raj Rajkumar, a professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-director in the school’s General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Information Technology Collaborative Research Lab. Although the details have yet to be figured out, the next project could include technology that permits cars to speak with one another and with traffic signals to help avoid accidents. Rajkumar also wants to test out building redundancy into the car’s mechanical systems, so if one component (including the brakes) fails, there’s a backup system that can take over. Boss 2 will also likely be able to drive faster than 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) each hour (Boss’s current top speed).
Tartan fashioned the original Boss, named for legendary GM inventor Charles “Boss” Kettering, from a Chevy Tahoe. “Chevy wanted to promote the Tahoe, and the vehicle’s height also helped,” Rajkumar says. “For this reason, the next vehicle will also be an SUV, but possibly a hybrid.” A Chevy Tahoe hybrid is the frontrunner to become Boss 2, he stated, although the team is evaluating other SUVs as well.
The first Boss isn’t headed for your scrap heap just yet. Rajkumar and his colleagues are using the automobile to develop a “”virtual valet”” system that will allow a vehicle to be driven manually or automatically. Imagine driving your car or truck to the mall and turning over control to a computer to navigate safely throughout the parking lot. Outfitted with 64radar and lasers, LIDAR (light detection and ranging), cameras, GPS sensors and accelerometers, Boss would be a whole lot better at avoiding hazards than most humans we know.
DARPA has no plans for hosting another autonomous vehicle competition. In 2007, Boss beat out a field of 10 rivals on a course that tested their ability to obey the rules of the road while avoiding obstacles like parked cars. Boss won the $2 million prize by averaging about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) per hour over approximately 55 miles (88.5 kilometers), finishing the course about 20 minutes ahead of the second-place finisher from Stanford University.
