Caroline: An Autonomously Driving Vehicle for Urban Environments
This work addresses autonomous driving in urban environments for robotics and AI competitions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing challenge frameworks.
The paper describes the development of Caroline, an autonomously driving vehicle that competed in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, where it qualified for the final event and was the best non-US team.
The 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge afforded the golden opportunity for the Technische Universität Braunschweig to demonstrate its abilities to develop an autonomously driving vehicle to compete with the world's best competitors. After several stages of qualification, our team CarOLO qualified early for the DARPA Urban Challenge Final Event and was among only eleven teams from initially 89 competitors to compete in the final. We had the ability to work together in a large group of experts, each contributing his expertise in his discipline, and significant organisational, financial and technical support by local sponsors who helped us to become the best non-US team. In this report, we describe the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, our contribution "Caroline", the technology and algorithms along with her performance in the DARPA Urban Challenge Final Event on November 3, 2007.