The Book: The University of Louisiana's CajunBot

[HelmutVII]

Excellent show. National exposure for the LITE center and other good things on the team. Major differences between the team shown. The MIT guys had so much on their machine they had to add extra computing power that had to have Air Conditioning. Kind of felt sorry for the NJIT guys. This episode showed our guys having no problem with the on site visit with all the required tests performed in 2 hrs and 4 min of the 4 hours allowed.

[rhineaux]

I just remembered that the next episode of Robocars is playing now. I've got it on the DVR, but if you couldn't tune in, it plays again tonight at midnight, and I'm sure it will probably play again a few times before next week.

I haven't watched it so I'm not sure how much it talks about the CajunBot, but when I saw the previews, it showed several clips of them on the course.
igeaux.mobi

[NewsCopy]

 Leaders of Team CajunBot and University of Louisiana officials lauded team members and sponsors during an awards ceremony at the Advanced Computer Technology and Research building on campus. The team most recently was one of 10 featured in the Discovery Science channel’s five-part series “Robocars.”

In 2004, 2005 and 2007, team members built two autonomous vehicles which competed in the Department of Defense’s challenges which pitted driverless vehicles against one another in on a desert course and city streets. The first two challenges featured CajunBot – a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. In 2007, team members showcased CajunBot II - a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.

“When we look back 50 years from now, these challenges will most likely be remembered as events that changed automotive history,” said Dr. Arun Lakhotia, team leader for Team CajunBot. “I want the team members to have something that they can show to their grandchildren or great grandchildren to tell them ‘I was there. I played a role in that history.’”

Awards were given out in three categories including:

Red Brass Team Members: Trouble Arnold, Adrian Aucoin Jr., Firas Bouz, Rochelle Brasseaux, Joshua Bridevaux, Charles Cavanaugh, Muralidar Chakravarthi, Ronald Cheek, Russ Danna, Adam Dupre, Daro Eghagha, Suresh Golconda, Dallas Griffith, Joshua Hargrave, John Herpin, Arun Pratap Indugula, Nitin Jyoti, Arun Lakhotia, Patrick Landry, Chris Ledet, Adam Lewis, Anthony Maida, Danny Majors, Mark McKelvy, Chris Meaux, Pablo Mejia, Christopher Mire, Santhosh Padmanabhan, Prashant Pathak, Amit Puntambekar, Jonathan Raush, Ryan Rucker, Gunasekaran Seetharaman, Mike Speers, Chandan Uddaraju, Christopher Vaughn, Vidhya Venkitakrishnan and Scott Wilson.

Red Brass Sponsors: U.S. National Wetlands Research Center, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Begnaud Manufacturing Inc., Broadpoint Inc., Pixus Digital Printing, Cain’s Auto Service, Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, Honda of Lafayette, Cajun Off-Road, Espion International, SICK Inc., Ibeo Automobile Sensor GmbH, Iteris Inc., 2 the Max ATVs, Loretta Tauzin, Lark Chartier and Joey Pons.

Glass Awards: Lafayette Motors, Firefly Digital Inc., C&C Technologies, Brother Ray Majors, Quality Transport Inc., MedExpress Companies, Oxford Technical Solutions Ltd., Charles D. Cavanaugh and Arun Lakhotia.

Special MVP awards were given to Joshua Bridevaux, Pablo Mejia and Suresh Golconda. The “Hidden Hand” award was given to former UL President Ray Authement.

“This team has done such outstanding work to have UL Lafayette counted amongst the elite engineering schools,” said Lakhotia. “They have worked incredibly hard, going 36 hours and even 50 hours without sleep. For the four years we have been going back to challenges, I didn’t have the time to look up and recognize their hard work. Now, it’s time to do that.”

Lakhotia said the future of Grand Challenges will depend on the DoD, but the team isn’t waiting.

“We’ve found several niches to apply the technology we’ve developed,” he said. “We are looking at applications of autonomous vehicles in homeland security, applications of the rich sensors on the robot for surveying and most importantly, the application of our unique virtualization capability in creating 3-D models of neighborhoods an cities.”

University of Louisiana News Services

[Hammer58]

How about UL's engineering team participating in the DARPA Project. You know, the CajunBot? Do a google search on that project and see the competition (top univeristies like Stanford) that we hung with. Also, there is the recent Beuiselie (sp?) project. Fun and DocRagCajun should be able to provide more examples.

[ManAboutTown]

_ How about UL's engineering team participating in the DARPA Project. You know, the CajunBot? Do a google search on that project and see the competition (top univeristies like Stanford) that we hung with. Also, there is the recent Beuiselie (sp?) project. Fun and DocRagCajun should be able to provide more examples. _

Yea Hammer, I aware of the projects. But I'm dealing with an A&M'er, remember? They going to point to rankings, and deparments, and yatta yatta.. I'm looking for something along these lines..

[NewsCopy]

Google uses Darpa Technology to launch self driving car

  Running the project are engineers from the Darpa challenges, which were vehicle races arranged by the U.S. government, Google said.

Google said it’s “confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing” and reduce use of cars and energy.

The rest of the story