Cedric Dupont, engineer for Volkwagen and collaborator on Stanford’s DARPA Grand Challenge team, has written an enchanting article on building Stanley for the 2005 DARPA grand Challenge.

Why Stanley? Stanford was originally planning to use a Ford SUV for this project, and Mike thought it would be clever to call the robot “Stan” (Stanford, get it? I thought you would). Obviously this joke did not work with the VW Touareg, and the team chose “roadrunner” as the new codename. In fact most of Mike’s original code still refers to “roadrunner”. A few months later, when the time came to have our first press event we revisited the issue of naming. Both Pamela Mahoney (our liaison with major sponsor MDV) and myself felt that “Roadrunner” did not sound likeable enough, and there was also a brief consideration of trademark issues (Plymouth produced a Road Runner). Reminiscing the early Stan I proposed Stanley, which was deemed to sound more friendly, “human” and somehow recalled the pioneering/exploratory dimension of this project. And so the car was christened. Anecdotically, in the summer of 2005 Joe and I built a duplicate as back up, that we dubbed “Stanlette”. It was a near perfect copy, with a few minor differences in the skidplate and bumper guard, an improved electric system and a more modern engine (the 6-cyl TDI). For the record, we never had to use our backup and it is the original Stanley, the same one that survived thousands of miles of testing that conquered the Darpa Grand Challenge.

Stanley was installed at the Smithsonian in 2006.

[Thanks Lem!]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm and is filed under History, Neat Stuff, RoboToys, Robot Overlords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.