Ohio State University at the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge: developing a completely autonomous vehicle

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a field test designed to accelerate R&D in autonomous ground vehicles that save lives on the future battlefield. At Ohio State University, we have extensive experience in developing autonomous ground vehicles. Our goal was to create a completely autonomous vehicle that could negotiate most of the GC 04 route and perhaps even finish the race. To achieve our goal, we needed to conquer three main technical challenges. The first was to install drive-by-wire technology in the vehicle and to modify the vehicle to fulfill DARPA safety requirements. The second challenge was to provide sensing and information fusion algorithms. The third challenge was control.