The Stanford Photonics Research Center

September 15, 2008

This talk will introduce the SPRC audience of the General Motor’s research efforts on computer perception to improve driving safety.  We will describe the DARPA Urban Challenge, which is a 60-mile race through an urban environment where vehicles had to follow the traffic rules, and GM-CMU’s entry Boss, the autonomous vehicle that won the challenge.  We will overview Boss's system  architecture and highlight its road modeling technologies using photonic sensors.  We will also discuss a clear path detection method which is the next step to further improve the road modeling for autonomous driving.
 
Wende Zhang has been with General Motors R&D and Planning, Warren, Michigan, since July 2005, where he is currently a senior researcher.  He led the efforts on using computer vision to improve driving safety.  Wende was also the technical lead on computer vision in the GM-CMU team that won the DARPA Urban Challenge.  His work includes seven patents filed and 19 publications.  He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He received the B.S. degree in electronics engineering from the Shanghai Jiao-Tong University in 2001. Wende served as program committee of Sigma Xi at GM R&D chapter since 2007.