The 'Team Spirit of Las Vegas' is using u-blox' sensor-based dead-reckoning board, the SBR-LS, to guide their unmanned vehicle in the Grand DARPA challenge next year.
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a race of autonomous unmanned vehicles, beginning near Los Angeles and ending in Las Vegas. The winning team receives prize money to the amount of $1 million. The course is around three hundred miles of gruelling on- and off-road conditions against competing unmanned vehicles. The contenders have to overcome desert-like conditions, including, but not limited to mountains, canyons, Joshua tree forests, boulders, ditches, and riverbeds, possibly dry and/or wet conditions.
On 13 March 2004, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will kick off the competition as a way to stimulate the creation of new concepts for ground-based unmanned vehicles.
The SBR-LS uses u-blox' own 16-channel, low-power ANTARIS GPS chipset. The position is determined by combining GPS signal with information from the vehicle, such as the speed pulse.
"Having accurate position, velocity and heading information is absolutely crucial for success in this most challenging competition," says US Air Force Major Kent Tiffany, leader of the 'Team Spirit of Las Vegas'. "We need to have 100% reliable and accurate position information all the time, more so during GPS outage areas. The u-blox dead-reckoning solution will guide us under extremely adverse conditions, even with weak or no GPS signal. The SBR-LS is easy to integrate and self-calibrating. What else can you ask for?"
Comments Nikolaos Papadopoulos, of u-blox America: "We developed our inexpensive dead-reckoning solution with urban canyons in mind. I am looking forward to see the SBR-LS excel also in real canyons."
The 'Team Spirit of Las Vegas' is a mixed team of 'off-time' government workers (USAF, US Government, and NASA), as well as big contractor employees such as Boeing with unparalleled backgrounds in unmanned vehicles.
For more information contact u-blox representative, RF Design, 021 762 5365.
For more information on the DARPA challenge see www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge
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