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CMU's robot car passes early tests

CMU's robot car passes early tests

Boss, the robotic car that Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing has developed, today successfully performed a series of driving tasks, without human assistance, in an effort to qualify for the National Qualification Event of the Urban Challenge.

Representatives from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Department of Defense agency that is sponsoring the Urban Challenge, put the car through four test runs, beginning with laps around a quarter-mile roadway near Robot City, the former LTV Steel site along the Monongahela River. It also had to drive through traffic at an intersection, safely wheel around parked cars in its own lane, one of which was in its lane immediately after a right turn, and turn around in a dead end.

DARPA required that the vehicle not exceed 15 mph. It also had to stop within a meter of a line at stop signs and stop several car lengths behind other vehicles in its lane, all of which it completed successfully.

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"Boss behaved like a good, beginning driver," said DARPA Urban Challenge Program Manager Norm Whitaker.

DARPA is putting 53 robotic vehicles through a qualifying round to reduce the field to 30. Qualifiers will be announced Aug. 9, Mr. Whitaker said.

The top three finishers in the Urban Challenge finals Nov. 3 will receive $2 million, $1 million and $500,000.


More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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First Published: June 18, 2007, 7:15 p.m.

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