#2 Extend project
I have made a simulator for the DARPA Urban Challenge
(www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp). It sits on
top of the USAR simulator. It has different objectives
and there are parts of USARSim that it does not need -
such as victims. It has other additional needs, such as
GPS instrumentation and operation on roads. Its main
objective is to drive a full sized autonomous vehicle
in urban traffic.
We are interested in taking the simulator public. I
would like to do this on SourceForge, either as a
separate project or part of USARSim. I want to keep the
two projects coordinated for easier maintenance -
moving my simulator from USARSim 1.0 to USARSim 2.0 was
a major hassle.
- Tyler Folsom PE, PhD
Team leader, Thunderbird Robotics
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
tfolsom@ieee.org
www.ubcthunderbird.com
www.tfolsom.com
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Hi Tyler,
I think that the Urban Challenge is a great application for USARSim. Are you aware that the
latest release already contains an Ackerman steered model and a sample world with a road
network? A few questions for you…
1) Can you provide some detail on what additions/changes you have made to the base?
2) What features (beside the GPS) are missing?
3) Have you thought of using the victims as pedestrians? In the very near future, we are
introducing a “world controller” that will allow you to easily script actors to follow
repetitive paths, and add and subtract actors and static meshes from the world.
I understand that you may not currently use or need all of the features of USARSim, but I would
encourage you to join the development team and include you mods in our release. Think of it as
a simulation operating system. You may not use all of the features of a given operating system,
but when you install it they are there anyway.
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Steve -
No, I have not checked the latest release. Will look at it
soon.
1) Additions and changes:
GPS.
New level simulating Robo-Magellan with orange cones.
2D Lidar scanner (apparently duplicates the latest release)
Simple UI change to display GPS and Lidar in 2D with colors
showing range.
Changes to SimpleUI to get it to actually work in 2.0.6
Robot with GPS and 2D Lidar
Improved scripts.
2) Missing features
Reader for mission definition (C source code released on
DARPA Grand Challenge web site)
Model of our jeep with proper physics.
Scoring on how well you have executed the mission.
Many more maps.
Incorporate GPS location and scale as a map property instead
of an instrument property.
Base the simulation on the Unwheel mod instead of on Death
Match.
Other vehicles.
Weather and time of day.
3) Victims as pedestrians is a good idea, but the current
Grand Challenge has no pedestrians. It does have other
vehicles, which can be parked, moving, or pulling out of
parking spaces.
I like your idea of becoming a developer. My main
hesitation is that I posted the idea of an open source
simulator on the DARPA GC discussion web site last week and
got no reply. I don't want this to be a one-way street. It
sounds like there is enough synergy in the USAR group. What
is the next step?
At March 15, 2007, the sourceforge project https://sourceforge.net/projects/urbanchallenge/ was created