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Photos of MIT’s DARPA Urban Challenge Car

Wade Roush 9/3/07

After interviewing MIT researchers Jonathan How and Seth Teller for my story “MIT Plans to Win DARPA Robot Car Challenge,” I snapped a few pictures with my iPhone. For captions, click on the individual photos in the slide show.

First, you’lll see a few shots of the car itself, carrying a phalanx of radars, video cameras, laser range detectors and other sensors on metal frames attached to its body. Then there are a couple of pictures of the interior of the car, showing the navigational display on the operator (passenger) side and the racks of equipment, including 10 quad-core computers and a gasoline-powered generator, crammed into the back. The remainder of the photos show various recorded data playing back on the navigational display, including data from an outing on real city streets (green circles with objects detected by the LIDAR in red) and on a test course (green circles with white and purple lines showing lane markers).