We are building a vehicle for the DARPA Grand Challenge.
200 miles across the desert, no driver. $1,000,000 prize.
See “http://www.overbot.com/public/joining.html”
We’re all unpaid volunteers. Most of us are Stanford alumni.
We have a shop in Redwood City, California. an off-road vehicle, and
private funding. We have mechanical engineers and
electronics technicians, and the vehicle and the low-level
control is coming along well. We need more programmers for
the higher level parts of the system.
There are five computers on the vehicle, and they all run
QNX. Three of the machines are small Ampro PC/104 machines; they
connect to all the actuators and sensors. Two larger machines
handle navigation and vision. All the machines are x86, running
QNX 6.2.1. All our code is in C++.
QNX experience is not essential; experience with some UNIX-like
OS at the command-line level is. Game programming experience
is helpful; we’re using some techniques from game AI.
If you join us, expect to sign a liability release and spend many
challenging hours building an autonomous robotic vehicle and its control
system. If we win, volunteers will get a share of the $1,000,000 prize.
This is a opportunity to work on one of the most exciting projects
in robotics today.
The competition will take place March 13, 2004, on a course between
Barstow and Las Vegas. We have much to do between now and then.
Our greatest need is for two lead software engineers willing and
able to put in at least 20 hours a week on this project.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
650-326-9109