The Car Appeared Courtesy Of Team Jefferson
The Car Appeared Courtesy Of Team Jefferson
The car appeared courtesy of “Team Jefferson,” a group that includes several U.Va. engineering undergraduate students and faculty members working alongside practicing engineers and inventors under the leadership of U.Va. alumnus Paul Perrone and his company, Perrone Robotics, based in Crozet. Sponsored in part by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, they have transformed a Scion xB compact car into a self-driving robotic car that may end up playing a major role in an autonomous method of transportation.
To do so, the tiny car will need to outlast and outperform more than 30 other robotic vehicles, many built with budgets a hundred times larger than Team Jefferson’s, that are competing for a $2 million top prize in the 2007 Grand Challenge competition sponsored by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The team behind Tommy Jr. enters this year’s competition — the world’s only driver-less car race — building upon its highly successful entry in the 2005 Grand Challenge, which required teams to create self-driving vehicles that could traverse 132 miles across the Mojave Desert in Nevada. Team Jefferson’s entry — a silver egg-shaped dune buggy named “Tommy,” built on a very small budget — finished among the top 10 in the 40-car field, which was itself chosen from 195 applicants.