Abstract: Do you think driving off-road over 175 miles through the Mojave desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas would be a tough task? Well imagine trying to do it with no driver onboard and no human intervention whatsoever. Later this year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a race of completely unmanned autonomous robotic vehicles through the Mojave desert. To the winner goes a $2 million cash prize. This talk is about ``Tommy'', the robotic vehicle being built by Team Jefferson (based out of Charlottesville, Virginia) as an entry into the DARPA Grand Challenge. In this talk, Team Jefferson's team lead will discuss the race and describe some of the issues and technology involved with building a vehicle to tackle such a grand challenge. In addition to matters of software engineering, the speaker will also describe bridging the gap between the software world and physical world including considerations for mechanical, electrical, hardware, and automotive engineering for the terrain in question.

Speaker Biography: Paul is the team lead for DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 applicant Team Jefferson. He has played a pioneering role in bringing safety-critical autonomy to large-scale distributed railway applications, is an author of many books/papers and speaker on advanced software framework technologies (including four Java technology books), founder of a successful software framework company (Assured Technologies), and developer of advanced AI and robotics technology including the founding of Perrone Robotics, Inc. making software platforms for robotics. B.S.E.E. from Rutgers University and M.S.E.E. from the University of Virginia.