DARPA Grand Challenge.com

Meet Junior, Stanford's entry into the 2007 Urban Challenge. Junior is a 2007 VW Passat. As you can see, Junior has already been festooned with sponsor logos -- VW, Intel, Google, and, uh, Red Bull. Guess we know what's keeping their programmers and engineers going through those late-night build sessions.

The official spec sheet explains the basics: platform and drive train by VW, high-resolution LIDAR for 3D imagery, a 6-way camera system, and an Applanix GPS set with 35 cm positional accuracy. Data processing is courtesy of an unspecified number of Intel Core 2 Duo processors. All this hardware probably draws some serious current -- the specs mention that VW fitted a special prototype high-output alternator to keep everything well-fed.

That's it for now; we'll see what we can dig up in the coming weeks. Read more at the Stanford team web site