July 9, 2009

Mini Grand Challenge

We have officially moved to a new permanent address, www.PoweredByNerd.com! Please check there for the latest hacks, tech, and projects!

Jeff (The Brown-Eyed Albino)



Just as a brief note to my readers, the recent lack of content has been due to my starting a rather large project, among other things. Since I am an Electrical Engineering student, my teacher and I had thought it a good idea to start something big.
The Mini Grand Challenge (named after the DARPA Grand Challenge) is a competition started by Penn State Abington, in which you must create an entirely autonomous vehicle. This means that you simply press a button, and have the beast go. The challenge portion of the MGC is that your vehicle must follow and stay on a path for three quarters of a mile, stop for people, watch for forks/road cones on the path, search for GPS coordinates, then go off-road for the last quarter mile. Neato!
One interesting point about this challenge is that in the five or so years that it's been running (it's an annual deal), no one has been able to complete the course.
Construction is going smoothly, so I'll try to keep you updated. No promises about other content though, this is quite time consuming.

The Brown-Eyed Albino

3 comments:

Siddhartha said...

This is very very difficult but obviously a very challenging project. I wish you every success with your MGC project.

Nilz

GPS Deals

The Brown-Eyed Albino said...

Thanks for the encouragement, Nilz! I believe I'm going to have the hardest time doing Image Recognition, but I may end up using sonar and infrared for obstacle avoidance, and color recognition for the road cones.

Thanks for the link on GPS deals, but I've already got most of the supplies I need. I'll try to keep everyone posted on our progress!

The Brown-Eyed Albino

Generic Levitra said...

Thank you so much for providing such a information. It has a big help for me. Hope to see more info updated.I must bookmark this article!