The Golem Group/University of California at Los Angeles autonomous ground vehicle in the DARPA grand challenge

This paper presents the Golem Group/University of California at Los Angeles entry to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge competition. We describe the main design principles behind the development of Golem 2, the race vehicle. The subsystems devoted to obstacle detection, avoidance, and state estimation are discussed in more detail. An overview of vehicle performance in the field is provided, including successes together with an analysis of the reasons leading to failures. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.