The Great Robot Race Part I
Objectives
- Learn about the Grand Challenge
- Learn about advances in mobile robotics
This assignment must be completed individually,
and you may not consult
with one another.
Create a new Microsoft Word or text document named YourUserName-A7.
In this assignment, we are going to watch the first part of an hour long program produced by public television's NOVA, which is the highest rated science and most acclaimed series on television, having won every major television award, most of them many times over. NOVA is also the most watched documentary series on public television.
NOVA has put together an hour-long special on the Grand Challenge, called "The Great Robot Race." We will watch the first 29:34 minutes of the program on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/23347, which will leave exactly 23 minutes to watch in a future assignment.
Note that you can alternatively go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/program.html and watch chapters 1-4. However, some students reported having difficulty with streaming from the pbs site, so this may want to use the Hulu link given above instead. For me, QuickTime in Chrome worked from the pbs site, after pushing the"Always run on this site button."
After watching the first part of the video(s) described above, answer each of the following questions using no more than 3 sentences per question:
- Who sponsored the Grand Challenge and what was it exactly?
- What were the motivations for this challenge?
- What happened during the 2004 race?
- Who is Red Whittaker and why is he important in the Grand Challenge?
- What kinds of sensors did "the Red Army" use?
- Who are the Hall brothers and how did their approach to the challenge differ from that of "the Red Army"?
- Describe DAD.
- Describe team TerraMax and their vehicle.
- Describe GhostRider.
- Of all of the vehicles presented, which do you think is the most likely to do well in the Grand Challenge. Be sure to explain why you believe this.
- What was the name of Stanford's entry, who was in charge of this team, and what is his background?
- Describe the vehicle entered by Stanford and the reasons for the choice of name for Stanford's entry?
- How did the Stanford team's approach to preparing the vehicle for the Grand Challenge differ from that of the Red Team?
- What is meant by the statement this race is like driving the robots "through a fog?"
- What is a gimble, who used one, and what are the advantages/disadvantages of using a gimble?
When you are finished, save the file as YourUserName-A7 and submit the file to the appropriate location in Moodle.