Video: Team Leader of 2005 DARPA GC Winners gives talk at Google
 

Apparently Google holds seminars for its employees where they invite bright lights of the technology community in to talk about recent developments or their accomplishments. I was going through the list of lectures when I saw one by Sebastian Thrun. You may (and should!) know him as the head of Stanford's winning entry into the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. In this video, he gives a 50-minute lecture about how Stanford went about building their robot from start to finish. It has lots of pictures and video, it's not just video of him talking. He is quite funny throughout, so it isn't just a dry "we did this, and this, and this" kind of presentation.

Here's the link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...17128412883394

Other DARPA Grand Challenge videos on the web:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/ - You can watch the Nova documentary that Thrun mentions in his Google presentation here
http://www.tartanracing.org/ - Homepage of the 2007 CMU Urban Challenge team. Has many videos and news updates

Re: Video: Team Leader of 2005 DARPA GC Winners gives talk at Google
 

If you really want to understand the math behind Grand Challenge vehicles, look to Thrun's book

This is one of the best robotics programming books i've read.