Dr. Sergey Drakunov, Professor of Physical Sciences at Embry-Riddle, who for the past four years has assisted GrayMatter in the development of vehicle control algorithms, will lead the project for the University.  Assisting him will be Dr. Charles Reinholtz, Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Daytona Beach Campus.  Dr. Reinholtz was previously associated with Team Victor Tango, sponsored by Virginia Tech, the third-finishing team in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

Velodyne Lidar, Inc., a leading manufacturer of high definition lidar sensors, and GrayMatter Inc., a provider of integrated software and hardware solutions for autonomous motor vehicles, announced today that Velodyne will distribute the GrayMatter Visionary™ point cloud visualization software. Velodyne will include a trial version of Visionary with each shipment of a Velodyne HDL-64E S2 lidar sensor.

The full version of Visionary, available for purchase directly from GrayMatter, provides a rich, user-configurable 3D point cloud view of the data points from the Velodyne sensor. The software displays the distance points as well as the return intensity. Advanced features for obstacle identification (wire framing), point size manipulation, and other functions are also available.

“Our collaboration with GrayMatter, which began at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, has resulted in an excellent visualization tool for our point cloud data,” said Bruce Hall, president of Velodyne. “GrayMatter has taken it a step further with their obstacle detection capability, demonstrating the capability of the HDL-64E S2 in autonomous vehicle applications.”
Originally developed for the DARPA Grand Challenge race of autonomous vehicles, the HDL-64E S2 provides a rich point cloud of accurate distance information to build a 3D model of the environment around the sensor, suitable for obstacle detection in autonomous vehicles and 3D mobile mapping. GrayMatter developed its software as a part of its Team Gray entry in the Urban Challenge, where it was a semifinalist.

“The Visionary software perfectly complements Velodyne’s high definition lidar sensors,” stated Eric Gray, president of GrayMatter. “Together we will enable our customers to leverage the innovation, expertise and strength of both companies and deliver an unprecedented value for autonomous vehicles.”

About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.

About Velodyne
Velodyne Lidar, Inc. is a leading manufacturer of high definition lidar sensors. Headquartered in Morgan Hill, California, the company’s HDL-64E sensor is used in a variety of military and commercial autonomous vehicle applications as well as 3-D mapping, surveying and other applications. For more information visit www.velodyne.com/lidar.

The most recent version of GrayMatter’s AVS™ control system for autonomous vehicles is in the final design stages. For the first time in its history, GrayMatter will use an outside manufacturing firm to produce the units that will be certified to the ISO 9000 standard. The new hardware will be smaller, lighter, and more efficient than the previous model.

The new form factor will allow the AVS™ to be installed quickly and without modification of the vehicle. GrayMatter anticipates that the combination of the new design and ISO certified manufacturing processes will allow the system to meet DOT standards for reliability and will reinforce the selection of AVS™ for vehicle dynamics testing.

The AVS™ Version 4.0 interoperates seamlessly with both the EMC and Stähle driving robots. For localization the AVS™ supports any GPS with integrated IMU capability. GrayMatter’s hardware and obstacle detection and avoidance software systems support Velodyne, Ibeo and SICK LIDAR sensors to allow for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles in changing and unpredictable environments.

Advanced control systems running in a real-time environment allows the AVS™ to control passenger vehicles aggressively at high speeds. A wide variety of vehicle behaviors ranging from high-speed vehicle dynamics maneuvers to simple path following supported by full map navigation will be available for autonomous operations. The wireless emergency stop and wireless data link allow for safe management of autonomous operations with the AVS™ Console. The AVS™ Console includes a 3D map display showing the vehicle’s progress along the planned route and charts displaying live telemetry.

The AVS™ Version 4.0 is expected to be available to the market in early 2009.

GrayMatter AVS™ Version 4.0 Initial Specifications

Size: 4″ x 9″ x 11″ (10cm x 23cm x 28cm)
Weight: 30 lbs (13.6 kg)
Power: 65w

About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.

The Great Robot Race homepage

A year before the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, no one in the robotics world had heard of the Gray Insurance Company. And no one from Gray Insurance, including the company’s lead software developer Paul Trepagnier, knew anything about robotics.

KAT-5 finished the 132-mile race in 7 hours and 30 minutes, averaging 17.5 mph.

“We were nobodies,” Trepagnier says, so it wasn’t surprising that NOVA’s cameras weren’t focused on them during the race. They are nobodies no longer. Against all odds, and in the wake of two devastating hurricanes, the Gray team finished close behind two robotics superpowers. Their “Kat-5″ was one of only five vehicles from the starting lineup of 23 to even finish the course. As Trepagnier explains in the following interview, if it weren’t for a “$2 million bug,” they might have even won it all.

An Impossible Goal

NOVA: How did an insurance company from suburban New Orleans get involved in the Grand Challenge?

Trepagnier: Well, Eric and Michael Gray, two brothers who are owners of the company, are avid readers of Popular Science. There was an article in Popular Science about the first Grand Challenge and how they were having a second Grand Challenge. Eric read the article and left it on Michael’s desk with it circled saying, “Are we crazy enough to do this?” Then Michael sent an e-mail out to a bunch of people asking, “Are we crazy enough to do this?” And apparently enough people said, “Yes.”

So they took the next step, which was to do a little research to figure out what it would cost, the logistics behind it. They figured out, “Okay, this seems doable from a monetary and logistics standpoint.” Then they approached me. My main job before the Grand Challenge was to develop software for our e-business site, to let our clients see their insurance data online. The Grays thought highly, I guess, of me, and they came to me to see if I could program it. And I said—and these are the famous last words that I’ll never, ever be able to live down—I said, “No, it’s impossible.”

NOVA: That didn’t stop them?

Inside the team's modified Ford Escape Hybrid, a computer nicknamed "Gray Matter" replaces the brain of a human driver.

Trepagnier: No. They said, “Okay,” and they kept moving along. So I saw that they were serious. Then DARPA had a conference out in California where they announced the 2005 Grand Challenge and the rules. I flew out there with them. And throughout the whole thing I kept thinking, “You know, it is doable. We can do this.” So when we got back, I started working on it.

NOVA: Did the Gray brothers have any experience with robotics or computer science?

Trepagnier: No.

NOVA: None at all?

Trepagnier: No. Before meeting up with [team members from] Tulane, I was the most knowledgeable in computer science. I had a masters in computer science.

NOVA: Had you ever worked in robotics?

At DARPA's National Qualification Event, Jorge Nagel (left), Powell Kinney, and Paul Trepagnier work out a bug in their programming.

Trepagnier: No. No robotics, no artificial intelligence, nothing like that. I’m pretty much a business programmer. But I had the theoretical background in computer science. So I’d touched on a lot of the things that the Grand Challenge involves.

“Our main strategy was to keep it simple.”

NOVA: When you joined Gray Insurance five years ago, did you have any idea that you would end up part of a team building a driverless SUV?

Trepagnier: Absolutely not.
Playing catch-up

NOVA: The race was in early October 2005. When did your team really get up and running?

Trepagnier: I would say mid-March. We had decided to use a Ford Escape Hybrid, and I think we got number 30 off the assembly line. We sent it off to a company called EMC, Electronic Mobility Controls, to get it set up with a drive-by-wire system. [Such systems, which translate computer signals into vehicle operations, are commercially available and widely used by physically disabled drivers.] Then we got the vehicle back in mid-March.

NOVA: So you started late in the game. Did that put you at a disadvantage?

Trepagnier: Oh, of course. From mid-March, we had just six weeks to get ready for the site visit [when DARPA officials came to judge if the team was worthy of competing]. We had six weeks to get the vehicle fully autonomous and avoiding obstacles—an insane goal. Yet somehow—I mean, we didn’t have the best site visit, but we were good enough to make it.

A dusty robot and a happy crew. From left, Paul Trepagnier, Powell Kinney, Jorge Nagel, and Matt Dooner (the core development team)

NOVA: Were you working day and night?

Trepagnier: The last week and a half, it was not quite nonstop, but it was close. In fact, we got our obstacle avoidance algorithms working at 3:00 a.m. the morning before the site visit.

NOVA: Is it true that you read up about video game programming to prepare?

Trepagnier: That was the first thing I did. When I came back from the California conference, I was still the only skilled programmer on the team. So I said, “Where am I going to find all this AI robotics and stuff like that?” I actually ended up going to Barnes & Noble and bought—I’m looking at the titles right now—I bought Programming Game AI By Example, Physics for Game Developers, AI Robotics. There’s a couple more. I bought game program books because they’re a great source for artificial intelligence algorithms, for pathfinding in particular.

NOVA: So these books had clues for how to program a robot to navigate through tough terrain?

Trepagnier: Yeah. For our DARPA site visit, we actually used a couple of algorithms that we got from the books. They got us past the site visit, at which point we threw most of that code away and said, “Okay, now we’ve got four months.” Before, we had six weeks. “Let’s step back and do this properly.”

“We put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this car. We didn’t want to stop because of Katrina.”

NOVA: Most of your core development team was students from Tulane, right?

Trepagnier: Yes. And when Gray joined up with Tulane, I decided to apply there to get my Ph.D. in computer science. So it was myself, Jorge Nagel, who is getting his masters in mechanical engineering, Powell Kinney, an undergraduate in biomedical engineering, and Matt Dooner, a computer science undergraduate.

NOVA: It’s a pretty young team.

Trepagnier: Yes.

NOVA: What was your strategy for designing the robot?

Trepagnier: It was very, very simple. Our main strategy was to keep it simple.

NOVA: You wrote in your application to DARPA, in your technical paper, that you planned to be “integrators rather than inventors.” What did you mean?

Trepagnier: It meant that, whenever possible, if there was a solution already available in the commercial or academic sector, just grab that, write the code to glue it together with the rest of our components, and move on.

NOVA: What did you originally name the vehicle?

Trepagnier: Originally we called it GrayBot because we didn’t really spend any time figuring it out.

NOVA: But the name evolved.

Trepagnier: Yes, well, Katrina hit. And that’s when we named her Kat-5.
Surviving the storm

NOVA: In the days leading up to Katrina hitting New Orleans, did you think it was going to impact your plans for the race?

Trepagnier: We actually didn’t think it was going to hit us. Here’s the timeline for us: On Friday night, we were getting ready for a little mini race against ULL’s [University of Louisiana, Lafayette] CajunBot. It was Michael’s philosophy that the more competition you can have beforehand the better. So we were going to have a mini-competition on that Saturday in a gravel pit in Hammond, which is up north across the lake.

So Friday night we got up to Hammond after work at, like, 6:00, 7:00. True to form, we stayed up all night doing an all-night stress test, because we had never run the vehicle for 10 hours straight. We started a program to run the car in the middle of a field on an endless loop. And we just watched it run and run and run, and we had a good time and just watched it make circles.

Then, about 4:00 in the morning, we had the radio on. And all of a sudden we hear on the radio that Katrina now has jogged to the left, and it’s coming straight for New Orleans, and they’re likely going to call for an evacuation either Saturday or Sunday.

So that kind of changed things. I left and got back home around 6:00 that Saturday morning. Walked in the door and told my wife Jennifer that we were evacuating in four hours and promptly went to sleep. Woke up three hours later, packed everything in the car, and left. And we drove to Lake Charles, Louisiana with our son Taylor, who was about a year and a half old then, to ride out the storm. My wife was able to get a hotel room there.

But the technical paper for DARPA was due that Monday. So I’m sitting in a hotel in Lake Charles the morning Katrina hits trying to get the data off the server in New Orleans so that I can e-mail it to DARPA. I know that we’re going to lose power in our main building any minute, so I’m dialed into my computer at work trying to get all the pictures and graphs and all the text that I’ve written before we lose power. I put it all together in my hotel room and e-mailed it from there.

NOVA: Where was the vehicle?

Trepagnier: The vehicle was in Hammond. We actually had a very strong structure, a Quonset hut up there. They parked the vehicle in the hut.

NOVA: Was Hammond hit?

Trepagnier: Hammond’s north of the city. It got the winds and the rain, but not the flooding.

NOVA: So the vehicle was fine.

Trepagnier: Oh, the vehicle was fine. Everything was fine, at least in Hammond. They got power back, I think, about a week and a half, two weeks after the storm.

NOVA: In those horrible few days when the city was flooding, what were you and the other team members thinking about in terms of the race?

Trepagnier: We really weren’t in communication. I was in Lake Charles until Tuesday. Our reservations were up on Tuesday because we thought it was just an evacuation. We’d evacuate for two days, drive back home. We’ve done it before. We did it during [hurricane] Ivan last year. We did it earlier this year—no big deal.

After two days, though, we didn’t have a hotel room, so we drove to Shreveport to stay with one of my wife’s friends. That’s when I finally got in touch with Michael Gray, who was in Tennessee. He said The Gray Insurance Company was moving offices to Baton Rouge temporarily. So I had to go to Baton Rouge to help move servers to get the company back up and running.

“We lost about three to four weeks of time just because we were all scattered to the four winds.”

NOVA: Did it ever seem like you just couldn’t move forward with the DARPA Challenge?

Trepagnier: Yes, it did. But when I got back to Baton Rouge and talked with Michael, he had talked with Matt and Jorge and Powell. Matt and Jorge were in Memphis. Powell was in Slidell. It looked like Tulane was going to be out, so they didn’t have anywhere else to be. And they didn’t want to stop working on it.

I felt the same way. I mean, we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this car. We didn’t want to stop because of Katrina. And then Michael said that the three Tulane students could stay up in Hammond. He’d pay for all their food and lodging. And when I was finished getting the company servers and stuff up in Baton Rouge, then I could get back on it as well. He committed to spending what it took to make sure the project went forward.

At that point, though, it became really just the four of us working on it. Before then, I’d say over 50 percent of the team was the IT department at Gray. But they had to get the business functioning in Baton Rouge.

NOVA: How many people on your team lost their homes?

Trepagnier: About 75 percent of us either had our homes destroyed or had enough damage to keep us from living in our homes, which was my case.

NOVA: Where did you live?

Trepagnier: We ended up at four different places during the evacuation. We’d go stay somewhere three, four nights, and then it was like, “Okay, we’re kind of in your hair.” It was an awkward situation. Some of our friends who kept us were just amazing, though. I’ll be indebted to them forever.

Eventually, I sent my wife and son to Austin to be with my sister and my parents, who had evacuated there. I moved to Hammond and just stayed there, worked 24/7 trying to get things done.
Katrina’s impact

NOVA: How did the storm change your plans for the vehicle and the race?

Trepagnier: Well, we lost about three to four weeks of time just because we were all scattered to the four winds. We lost half our team, who had to do stuff for the company. We were working off generators. And for a while, we couldn’t even go to stores to buy stuff because they were all closed. A lot of our lofty plans for how we were going to be the best just didn’t make it.

NOVA: When did you rename the vehicle?

Trepagnier: I’m not sure. I just remember that DARPA sent us an e-mail asking if we were okay. And we said, “Yes, we’re fine, but we’re renaming our vehicle Kat-5.”

NOVA: I doubt it was in honor of the storm.

Trepagnier: No. It was more an act of defiance: “You can mess with us, but you can’t put us down. We’re going to get back up again.” It’s also a pun, because while it’s obviously after Katrina, which was a category 5, the whole car is actually wired with cat-5 cabling.

NOVA: Given that at the first DARPA Grand Challenge not a single vehicle made it more than seven or eight miles—

Trepagnier: 7.3.

NOVA: (laugh) 7.3 miles. How far did you think—

Trepagnier: We said 7.4. When we first got involved in this, we said 7.4 miles would make us all happy.

NOVA: You didn’t think you would even make it to the finish line?

Trepagnier: Remember I said it was impossible at the beginning? No one will let me live that down, especially not Eric and Michael Gray. But honestly, especially after the NQE [the National Qualification Event, where the competitors for the final race were chosen], we were feeling, I don’t want to say confident, but we were feeling like we had a chance. And then our chase vehicle driver, who worked for DARPA, came up to us the morning of the race and said that of all the teams, he felt that we had a very, very good chance of finishing. And we were, like, “Wow. He’s been following all these cars during NQE and he thinks that we’ve got a good chance?” And then after 10, 20, 30 miles, we started going, “Hey, we’re doing well!”
The $2 million bug

NOVA: The winner this year, the Stanford team, took nearly seven hours to finish the course. Kat-5 finished just 37 minutes behind that.

Trepagnier: Yes. Have you heard about our $2 million bug?

NOVA: No. What’s that?

Trepagnier: Well, the director of DARPA said later that if we hadn’t had a bug where we slowed down in the dry lakebeds, we would have either beaten Stanford or been very, very close to Stanford’s car. The bug meant we went from 30 miles an hour to two miles an hour on all the dry lakebeds. We’d never tested in an area 100 feet wide like that. We call it the $2 million bug. Needless to say, it’s been fixed.

NOVA: Wow. Despite the bug, were you happy with how you finished?

Trepagnier: Oh, of course. When our car crossed the finish line, we just went insane! And then it got even better when our chase car driver said that our elapsed time was going to be somewhere in the seven hour range—which meant we were in the same league as Stanford and CMU [Carnegie Mellon University]. For us, with no previous experience and only about five and a half months of development, to be in the same league as CMU, which is just a robotics powerhouse, and Stanford—they’ve got some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley, and they’ve also got Sebastian Thrun, who worked at CMU. We were just so ecstatic.

NOVA: What made your team successful?

Trepagnier: Well, there are a few things. One, while we didn’t have the biggest budget, we at least had a decent budget [roughly $650,000]. We had a very small team of very competent people who trusted each other implicitly. That was so critical. I knew that if I asked Jorge to do something and he said, “Yes, I can take care of it,” that it was going to get done to either my expectations or better than my expectations. And we all felt that way. A small team can do so much so fast. As soon as you start adding 10, 20 people, you’ve got a bureaucracy. You’ve got people going in different paths, and it’s just not the same. Also, a lot of our skills and talents meshed really well with one another.

And after Katrina, we were on our own. We were an isolated group, and all we did, night and day, was work on the car. Most of the team slept in the same building as the car. I don’t think we could ever achieve that again.

NOVA: After the race, The Wall Street Journal ran a story under the headline “Amateur Team Defeats the Experts.” The story was pretty complimentary, but how do you feel about being characterized as amateurs? Is that fair?

Trepagnier: Pretty much. I mean, I now know a lot more about robotics—I’m getting a doctorate in it. But at the time, we were amateurs. We really had no experts, true experts on anything related to autonomous vehicles. I don’t think we’re amateurs anymore. We had a really impressive trial by fire that’s made us—I wouldn’t quite call us experts, but, you know—

NOVA: Seasoned?

Trepagnier: Seasoned, yes, is a good word.

NOVA: What’s next for the Gray team?

Trepagnier: It looks like there’s going to be another Grand Challenge.

NOVA: I hadn’t heard that.

Trepagnier: Well, they sent out questionnaires to all the teams that competed in 2005 asking our opinions on proposed formats and things like that. It’s not definite, but all signs indicate there’s going to be a Grand Challenge. Apparently they’re very interested in dealing with moving obstacles in an urban environment.

We’re looking forward to that, hoping that we get the chance to compete. We’re confident that given a year, year and a half of lead time with our core team still intact, that we’ll show the so-called experts that we’re no longer amateurs. But then again, we’ll also have a target painted on our backs. Everybody will be gunning for us because we won’t be the underdogs anymore.

“Robocars” premieres on Monday, July 14th at 10pm EST. The series will air every Monday at 10pm EST through August 4th, and will be followed by a recap of the series on Tuesday, August 12th at 6pm EST. Team Gray in particular will be featured in the first and third episodes of the series. If you can’t make the 10pm airing, there are many other show times listed here.

About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.

About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.

Source: SCIVESTOR

Summary: This presentation is being presented at RoboBusiness 2008. It highlights progress and challenges in the technologies necessary to facilitate civilian autonomous vehicles. We discuss a plausible technology driven autonomous vehicle roadmap from 2010 - 2030. The presentation highlights several emerging technology vendors including Velodyne, ibeo, Grey Matter, and TORC Technologies.

Findings: We present Renteria’s Hierarchy of Autonomy Needs - from Sensory Enablement to Basic Navigation to Business Logic. We discuss the fulfillment of these needs over the course of the three Grand Challenges. We lay out an autonomous vehicle roadmap and discuss key inflection points including: 1) The Cambrian technology explosion. 2) Adoption Hill. 3) The Plateau of Tenacity. SciVestor predicts adoption rates, reduction of fuel consumption, and vehicle deaths in 2020.

Authors: Ray Renteria and Jonas Lamis
Date: April 2008
Length: 32 pages
Research ID: O8R-002
Concepts Discussed: Grand Challenge, Urban Challenge, Autonomous vehicles, Prometheus Project, Stanley, Boss, Velodyne, ibeo, Grey Matter, TORC Technologies, roadmap

“Path following was the least of our concerns,” said development engineer Powell Kinney. “By starting with the AVS™ platform we were able to focus on the task of identifying and navigating traffic without worrying about driving the car.” The accomplishment of such a small team was largely facilitated be the robustness and precision of the AVS™. By utilizing the excellent safety systems built into the AVS™ to monitor the experimental traffic software, Team Gray was able to develop Plan B at an incredible pace without compromising the safety of the system.

The team passed the safety checks without a problem and quickly moved on to the evaluation runs DARPA had planned. The design of Plan B incorporated safety to such a fine level that DARPA’s restrictive courses confused Plan B, causing it to often stop instead of proceed into a potentially unsafe situation. “Plan B’s sensors make no differentiation between a safety barrier and a real world object. We treated all stationary objects with the same degree of caution; trees, concrete barriers, and houses were all given the same margin of safety.” It was this caution that caused Plan B not to complete all of it’s qualification runs and lead to it’s eventual disqualification.

GrayMatter, Inc. is an affiliate of Gray & Company, Inc. headquartered in Metairie, Louisiana. The company’s principal business provides primary liability insurance coverage to companies engaged in oil and gas, marine and construction activities.

About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.

ANAHEIM, CA - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today released the names of 36 teams from around the country that were selected as semifinalists in the 2007 Urban Challenge, a race for autonomous vehicles to be held in November of this year. Among those selected was Team Gray, a Metairie, Louisiana team made up of employees of GrayMatter, Inc.

Team Gray is the racing venture of GrayMatter, Inc., makers of the AVS™ driving system. The team began competing in autonomous ground vehicle competitions in response to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Their vehicle “KAT-5″ finished fourth in a 132-mile race across the Nevada desert without any human interaction, becoming one of only five vehicles out of 195 entrants to finish the grueling course. Team Gray’s new vehicle, “Plan B,” is a showcase of the latest technologies developed by GrayMatter for fields ranging from military hardware to automotive testing equipment.

Building on the success of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, the Urban Challenge will take autonomous vehicle out of the desert and into the urban arena. Whereas the Grand Challenge pitted driver-less vehicles against the harsh terrain of the Nevada desert, the Urban Challenge presents a whole new set of hurdles. According to Dr. Tony Tether, Director of DARPA, “The vehicles must complete a simulated battlefield supply mission in an urban area. The vehicles must obey California traffic laws, merge into traffic, navigate traffic circles, negotiate busy intersections, and avoid moving obstacles.” All of this must be completed without a human driver or remote operator.

Dr. Tether went on to discuss the scope of the thirty-six competitors that had been selected as semifinalists. Speaking of the five teams to complete the 2005 Grand Challenge, Dr. Tether stated that “only one of them was rated in the top five of these thirty-six [semifinalist]“. He closed his presentation by revealing that team as Team Gray.

Team Gray is hoping that its simple yet robust approach that made the team so successful in the 2005 Grand Challenge will pay off again in November, but before that, the team must prove itself to in the National Qualifying Event (NQE) in late October. The NQE will be used to determine the twenty finalists that will participate in the Urban Challenge. In the time leading up to the NQE, Team Gray and University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Team Cajunbot, another semifinalist, are scheduled to hold several friendly “mini-challenges” to allow both Louisiana teams to evaluate solutions and share expertise.

The Urban Challenge will be held in Victorville, California at the site of the former George Air Force Base on November 3, 2007. The NQE will be held at the same location from October 26 to October 31.

To view the video of DARPA’s announcement, please visit our videos page.

About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.

Metairie, LA - Tuesday, July 3, 2007 - Personnel from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were present on June 26 to judge the performance of Team Gray’s entry into the 2007 Urban Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate development of autonomous vehicles for use by the military. An autonomous vehicle is neither piloted nor remotely controlled, but is provided an electronic roadmap of the relevant area and assigned a destination. From that information the autonomous vehicle calculates the best route and obeying relevant traffic regulations, travels to its destination. Should a route become blocked or unavailable, the vehicle will adjust its planned path and find another route to complete its mission.

DARPA’s evaluation of the vehicle’s behavior will determine whether or not the team will be selected to compete in the National Qualification Event (NQE) in October. The test was conducted at the Louisiana State Police Emergency Vehicle Operations Center in Zachary, Louisiana, and was filmed for the Discovery Science Channel as part of a program to be broadcast later in the year.

Team Gray’s vehicle, “Plan B” was driven by the GrayMatter AVS™, an autonomous vehicle system designed for civilian and military automotive applications. This commercially-available unit accommodates a wide variety of drive-by-wire systems and environmental sensors. For the purposes of the Site Visit, “Plan B” was equipped with vehicle actuators often used by the handicapped to facilitate operation of a motor vehicle provided by Electronic Mobility Controls, LLC located in Baton Rouge. “Plan B” mounted laser scanners mounted at each corner to see any obstacles in its path and a GPS system to monitor its position on the roadway. Thus equipped, “Plan B” was completely prepared to tackle the challenge of the Site Visit.

“Plan B” demonstrated its ability to negotiate situations representative of those that will be encountered in a final round of field testing in October. Team Gray’s vehicle was assigned four different missions, in two of which it encountered other vehicles on the course. During one run, “Plan B” was required to identify and pass a stopped vehicle in its lane. In another, human-driven vehicles were used to present a variety of situations that might be encountered at a four-way intersection. “Plan B” made all tests look simple as it obeyed normal traffic rules, transitioning smoothly from one scenario to another.

While other teams competing in the DARPA Urban Challenge use auxiliary generators or heavy-duty alternators to supply sufficient electricity to their power-hungry computers, actuators, and sensor platforms, “Plan B” completed the entire Site Visit using only 168 watts of power, roughly the power available from a normal vehicle’s cigarette lighter socket.

DARPA officials were pleased with the vehicle’s smooth and consistent driving style, a credit to the capabilities of the GrayMatter AVS™. In addition, the multiple hardware and software safety systems standard in the AVS™ greatly exceed DARPA’s expectations for its autonomous vehicle competitions. DARPA will reveal on August 9th the list of teams that successfully completed the Site Visit and will progress to the national qualifying event to be held in the “western US” in late October.

Team Gray began development of autonomous vehicles in response to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Their vehicle “KAT-5″ finished fourth in a 132-mile race across the Nevada desert without any human interaction. Their cumulative success is a compelling story that points towards an expected strong showing at the Urban Challenge this fall.

GrayMatter, Inc. is an affiliate of Gray & Company, Inc. headquartered in Metairie, Louisiana. The company’s principal business provides primary liability insurance coverage to companies engaged in oil and gas, marine and construction activities.

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About GrayMatter, Inc.
GrayMatter, Inc. provides integrated software and hardware solutions that facilitate autonomous operation of motor vehicles. The GrayMatter AVS™ integrates with virtually any commercially available environmental sensors and GPS systems to allow the vehicle to navigate a selected route while dynamically avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic laws as would a human driver. GrayMatter was founded in 2005 to participate in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 132 mile race across the desert in which it was the fourth-finishing team, and was semi-finalist in the 2007 Urban Challenge. For additional information, navigate to www.graymatterinc.com.