Stanley (vehicle)

[6] For navigation, the car was equipped with five roof-mounted Sick AG LIDAR units to build a 3-D map of the environment, thus supplementing the position sensing GPS system.

Additional guidance data was provided by a video camera used to observe driving conditions out to eighty meters (beyond the range of the LIDAR) and to ensure room enough for acceleration.

[7] To process the sensor data and execute decisions, the car was equipped with six low-power 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M based computers in the trunk, running different versions of the Linux operating system.

Using what Popular Mechanics described a "common robot hierarchy", the vehicle utilizes "low-level modules fed raw data from LIDAR, the camera, GPS sets, and inertial sensors into software programs [to control] speed, direction, and decision making.

The computer log of humans driving also made the car more accurate in detecting shadows, a problem that had caused many of the vehicle failures in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge.