July 9, 2009

Mini Grand Challenge

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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