Last Updated: November 26, 2007

News Headlines:

11.3.07
Odin finishes 3rd in the DARPA Urban Challenge! Victor Tango brings home $500,000 and DARPA's eagle trophy. First and second place went to Tartan Racing and Stanford, respectively.

10.19.07
Odin leaves for competition in Victorville Ca.

10.14.07
Victor Tango shows off Odin's capabilities on the roads of the Corporate Research Center (CRC). During this demo, Odin was able to merge with other traffic, detect blockages, replan a new route, and even park in the TORC Technologies parking lot!

6.29.07
DARPA visits VictorTango for the Urban Challenge qualification Site Visit. Odin completed all four MDF runs flawlessly. The scheduled test took 2 of the allotted 4 hours. For a video of the event, click here.

6.28.07
VictorTango hosts advisory board members from AAI Corp, Caterpillar, Cybermotion, SAIC, and National Instruments for a demonstration and discussion of the team’s progress and plans.

6-17-07
VictorTango demonstrates Odin’s driving prowess at a cookout for the newly formed AUVSI Blue Ridge Chapter.

6-8-07
Team VictorTAngo visited Caterpillar in Peoria, IL to give a demonstration of the vehicles to Caterpillar Electronics employees.

4-26-07
DARPA gives Team VictorTango the number 32 to commemorate those that lost their lives from the VT Tragedy.

3-13-2007
Caterpillar becomes a Victor Tango sponsor! View the Caterpillar on-campus photos here.

2-18-2007
The Roanoke Times publishes an article about TORC and their role on the Victor Tango team. Click here to see the article.

News Archive

Vehicle Technologies

Team V ictor T ango will be entering Odin into the Darpa Urban Challenge. Odin is based on a Hybrid Ford Escape platform and will be used to develop urban autonomous vehicle technologies such as traffic behavior modeling, route planning, autonomous parking, road detection, and vehicle passing.

Odin

Ford donated two Hybrid Escapes. We will use one for testing and the other for the final design. Below is a picture of the vehicle in an early test state with some of the sensors labeled. The final vehicle configuration also shown below has additional SICK laser scanners as well as a stronger roof rack.

Earlier Test Vehicles:

VT SRX

VT SRX was originally developed by Virginia Tech to compete in the NFB Blind Driver Challenge and is one of the first large JAUS interoperable consumer vehicles. Odin already has a solid technical foundation in place. Software follows the JAUS architecture, simplifying the integration of new software modules as well as allowing software to be tested on multiple platforms. The figure below shows the systems in place as of the Summer of 2006.

Our plan for new sensing and intelligence systems coming soon...

Cliff & Rocky

Cliff has competed in the previous two Grand Challenge Competitions (2004 & 2005) while Rocky competed in the 2005 Grand Challenge. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, Cliff and Rocky finished in 8th and 9th places respectively. Cliff and Rocky are now undergoing conversion to JAUS interoperability, and will remain a valuable part of the team for use as test platform and drone vehicles for testing traffic scenarios. Learn more about Cliff & Rocky at the previous Virginia Tech Grand Challenge webpage .