Maker

LOW BUDGET: Mahesh Chengalva wrote all the code for the low-budget, high-ambition Ody-Era (#55). Other robot cars had so much computer power that they required onboard gen-sets for power and air conditioning.

cameras and a desktop computer to sense the environment. A local farmer lent us the John Deere GPS from his farm tractor,” says team member and software engineer Mahesh Chengalva.

With simplicity as its watchword, the car utilizes a program consisting of only 4,000 lines of Visual Basic code to drive itself. Contrast that with the hundreds of thousands of lines of code inside the control algorithms of many competitors.

Ody-Era passed several key hurdles but was stopped well before the finals, undone by a problem with the computer that controlled its drive-by-wire steering.

The team has few regrets. “We did our best, that’s all we can say,” says Bletsis. “Our technology is so novel, nobody else here has much like it.”

SIMPLER: PLAN B

If the first idea didn’t work, then maybe it’s time to consider Plan B. Many would find it surprising that two brothers who run an insurance company in New Orleans would have the interest and the technical know-how to develop an autonomous vehicle able to compete with bigger, richer teams like Tartan Racing and Stanford University. But the

Gray brothers are serious about robot drivers, and they’ve developed their own autonomous vehicle called Plan B.

Plan B is a Ford Escape Hybrid packed with sensors and Linux-based computer intelligence. If your map is good, they say, you merely need to tell the vehicle where to go and let the SUV find its own way.

For just $365,000, give or take a few thousand, Team Gray Racing will sell you a real, live autonomous vehicle, complete with an Oxford Technical Solutions GPS system accurate to 10 centimeters, a Velodyne 3D high-definition LIDAR sensor, a fly-by-wire steering and braking system, and Gray Racing’s own AVS- 2 intelligent driving computer with obstacle detection and dynamic rerouting capabilities.

Team Gray Racing did very well in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, being one of only five teams to finish. It would have been a miracle if little Team Gray had reached the finals in the 2007 Urban Challenge. But there was no miracle this time, for Plan B was axed in the final cut, the day before the final event.

NOT SIMPLE: BOSS

Boss, an autonomous 2007 Chevy Tahoe, is like the

40 Make: Volume 14