CES 2008: Carnegie Mellon Driverless Car Uses Ubuntu

The Carnegie Mellon vehicle, while not as attractive like other cars from CES, has other surprises: it's a driver-less automobile, running Ubuntu.

McCabe Software, Inc., through the McCabe University Program, provided the team from Carnegie Mellon with its software quality management suite, McCabe IQ. Tartan Racing – Carnegie Mellon's team – won the 2007 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge, a competitive rally for autonomous cars.

In the Urban Challenge, the vehicles have to navigate, park and make their way through traffic on a 60-mile-long suburban course (approx. 100 km). They must operate without any human guidance, relying only on sensors and computers. Also, the cars must obey the traffic laws, avoid obstacles and negotiate intersections. In 2007, the big prize was $2 million, while the second and third places took $1 million and $500,000 respectively.

The Chevy Tahoe, called Boss, is truly a masterpiece. It includes ten computers with a dozen Intel Core 2 and 200,000 lines of software. Because of the complex nature of the software, Tartan Racing Team selected McCabe IQ for analyzing the extremely large C++ code base. Teaming up with Michael Clark of Tartan Racing and Carnegie Mellon's Robotic Institute, McCabe ported McCabe IQ onto Ubuntu 6.06 – a LTS edition of Ubuntu – in only a few days.

David Belhumeur, McCabe Software's CEO, said before the competition: "We are delighted to be sponsoring the Tartan Racing Team and associating our company with an institution such as Carnegie Mellon. Their participation in the McCabe University Program grants them access to the same enterprise level quality and testing solutions as industry leaders like Intuit, MasterCard, and Lockheed Martin."

If using Ubuntu 6.06 was a success, maybe this year the team will use Ubuntu 8.04 – which will be released in April – another LTS edition of Ubuntu. Who knows, maybe they'll win again the DARPA Urban Challenge.