DARPA Urban Challenge: Unveiling our algorithm

In a previous entry, I mentioned the fact that we are unveiling our strategy.unveiling our strategy for our entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge (DARPA Urban Challenge is about driving at a record pace in some urban environment past many urban difficulties, including no GPS capability). This was not accurate, in fact, we really are going to unveil our algorithm. You'll be privy of the development quirks and everything that goes on implementing an algorithm that has to respond on-line to a challenging situation. I'll be talking on the history of why we are choosing specific algorithms over others. I will specifically talk more about manifold-based models for decision making in the race and the use of techniques devised to produce a storage device of previous actions in order to produce some sort of supervised learning capability. In the previous race, we were eliminated early mostly because we were plagued with mechanical problems that most of us had never faced before (none of us had robotics background), we hope to go farther this time as the vehicle is OK. For reference, we have already shown some of our drive by wire program before as well. We made some of our data available before and I expect, as time permit to do the same as we go along. Because our entry is truely innovative, we are trying to balance not getting eliminated by passing every steps of the application and those innovation in the algorithm. However, since all of us are not interested in just an autonomous car, our emphasis will always be on the side of doing something that most other entries are not attempting such as using compressed sensing and robust mathematical techniques for instance.