In the Urban Challenge, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the competing robots will have to accomplish missions in a simulated city environment, which includes the traffic of the other robots and traffic laws.
SLAM - Simultaneous localization and
mapping
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles to build up a map within an unknown environment while at the same time keeping track of their current position. This is not as straightforward as it might sound due to inherent uncertainties in discerning the robot's relative movement from its various sensors [from wikipedia].
Other Projects:
MSP - Mobile Sensing
Platform
The Mobile Sensing Platform is an integrated
sensing and inference platform. The research goals are to build new
multi-modal sensing hardware and to develop machine learning techniques for
inferring context from the raw sensor streams.
CARMEN - Robot Navigation
Toolkit
CARMEN is an open-source collection of software
for mobile robot control. CARMEN is modular software designed to provide
basic navigation primatives including: base and sensor control, logging,
obstacle avoidance, localization, path planning, and mapping.
