A New Race of Robots Has Seagate 'Driving' Behind the Wheel
11 Marzo 2004 - 1:59PM
PR Newswire (US)
A New Race of Robots Has Seagate 'Driving' Behind the Wheel Seagate
Provides Rugged Disc Drives for Red Team Robot Car in Darpa Grand
Challenge BARSTOW, Calif., March 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
Hurtling across a rutted, punishing landscape, dodging boulders,
the imposing vehicle hits a rise and catches air. Hits the ground
ready to swerve and avoids a sand pit. Sliding a little sideways,
it quickly adjusts before the next obstacle comes into view. It's
proven itself through rain and heavy mud, and the hefty,
free-spirited vehicle called "Sandstorm" could drive through one of
those too -- and there's not a human in sight, not on board, not
even holding a remote control. Early on March 13, 2004, near
Barstow, California, some of the most sophisticated autonomous land
vehicles ever assembled will embark on a race across the Mojave
Desert in the DARPA Grand Challenge. They have 10 hours to cover
210 miles of desert terrain and overcome the many barriers this
rugged landscape presents. There will be no drivers, no mechanics,
no human navigators. The only communication will be the starting
gun. The winning team will receive a prize of $1 million. This is
the first race of its kind, and Seagate is playing a major role
with the odds-on favorite Red Team, led by Carnegie Mellon
University, and its robotic vehicle, Sandstorm. The car prevailed
in Tuesday's qualifying round, driving impeccably. In today's
second qualifier at 10:30 a.m., the team will try to earn the
coveted pole position. How does Sandstorm find its way without the
help of a human pilot? Its onboard Seagate hard drives tell it
where to go. All the map and landscape information normally in a
human driver's brain is kept instead in Seagate Momentus notebook
hard drives, the toughest in the industry. The route data is
continually accessed and compared to real-time data from stereo
video cameras, scanning radar, scanning laser ranging sensors and
Global Positioning System receivers, using Sandstorm's Intel
processors, so Sandstorm will brake, turn or step on the gas at
just the right moment. "Sandstorm has to be fast, and must quickly
analyze terrain so that it knows whether to drive over a bush or
around a boulder," said Red Team leader Dr. William "Red"
Whittaker, the Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics at the
Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "So
we have to give it access to the best map data possible. The
Seagate hard drives have to be tough enough to survive the pounding
terrain and alsokeep seeking, reading and supplying new map
information for the robot to process. We've spent thousands of
hours with topographical maps and satellite and aerial imagery of
the Mojave Desert, developing a digital map that will be loaded
onto Sandstorm's onboard Seagate hard drives for the race." "The
most critical pieces to Sandstorm's abilities are the onboard hard
drives, with plenty of I/O power and robustness advances, the Intel
processors, the navigating global positioning system and the
mapping software," said Whittaker. "Seagate is in the hard drive
business, but Sandstorm is just into hard driving. Seagate made
sure these hard drives were ready for whatever the road brings,
building in the greatest ruggedness in the industry, and advising
our engineers on how to mount the drives in better, more robust
ways." Two families of Seagate hard drives are critical to
Sandstorm's success. High-speed Seagate Barracuda hard drives have
been used to help map various potential race routes. Those maps
will be used to calculate the optimal route on race day. After
thousands of hours spent gathering finely detailed topological map
data, assembling maps, models and aerial imagery of the area, an
enormous geographic database several terabytes in size is now ready
on the Seagate Barracuda hard drives. The final route instructions
will be transmitted to the Seagate Momentus hard drives on the
robot just before the race. Seagate Momentus hard drives are in the
"visual cortex" of the vehicle itself to support real-time
synthesis of map data and real-time sensor data. The Red Team,
including leader Whittaker, many Carnegie Mellon University
students and former students, and Seagate director of research
Kevin Gomez, has been planning for rugged race conditions; they've
been warned to expect narrow passages, tight turns, tricky sand and
plenty of obstacles. During the race, Sandstorm can't receive
instructions from any outside source. According to the rules, even
if a vehicle runs out of gas, it can only be serviced by another
autonomous vehicle. The Grand Challenge was developed by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to leverage
American ingenuity to accelerate the development of autonomous
vehicle technologies. DARPA invited 25 teams to its qualification,
inspection and demonstration event at the California Motor Speedway
in Fontana that concludes today. Some of America's most prominent
technology companies join Seagate in its sponsorship of the
Carnegie Mellon Red Team, including Boeing, Intel, SAIC, Alcoa,
BFGoodrich, Caterpillar, Earthlink, Trimble, Google, and others.
For more information on the benefits of developing autonomous
vehicles, please visit the Red Team's web site at:
http://www.redteamracing.org/significance.htm. Seagate is the
worldwide leader in the design, manufacturing and marketing of hard
disc drives, providing products for a wide range of Enterprise, PC,
Notebook and Consumer Electronics applications. The Company is
committed to delivering award-winning products, customer support
and reliability, to meet the world's growing demand for information
storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at
http://www.seagate.com/. NOTE: Seagate and Seagate Technology are
registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. The WAVE logo,
Barracuda and Momentus are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Seagate Technology LLC. All other trademarks or registered
trademarks are the property of their respective owners. DATASOURCE:
Seagate Technology LLC CONTACT: John Paulsen, +1-831-439-2499, or ;
or Woody Monroy, +1-831-439-2838, or , both of Seagate Web site:
http://www.seagate.com/
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