SURFers and the Urban Challenge
Yesterday the students working on the DARPA Urban Challenge presented posters describing their summer research, and I got to go over and see them. It was pretty neat - problems like this always provoke a lot of interesting ideas and approaches. I learned a couple of new things:
- I learned about clothoid curves, whose curvature varies linearly over the curve. They are also called Cornu spirals. This might be a surprise, but just about everybody has encountered a clothoid in a big way - they are most often used in rollercoaster loops because they require less energy than circular loops! Plus they don’t give you quite as bad whiplash.
- I also discovered that there is a new version of the A* pathfinding algorithm called Anytime Dynamic A* (or D* for short). It was developed at CMU, and it is more well-behaved than “standard A*” in situations where there isn’t a lot of time for pathfinding, or when environments are updating frequently. This could be a huge boon for gaming - pathfinding is a critical component of many games, and being able to dynamically scale the CPU resources for the pathfinding component could be very helpful.
Pretty neat stuff.