If Jonathan Stark has his way, you may soon find a robot in a garage near you. A Silicon Valley engineer, Stark has assembled Team Orange, made up of leading artificial-intelligence and robotics scientists and engineers, to develop a hybrid car that can drive itself without human assistance for the 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge.

Team Orange is a joint venture between Team Underdawg, a team that competed in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and the University of Illinois. The goal for the Urban Challenge is to build an autonomous vehicle that will complete a 60-mile course in an urban setting—navigating through moving traffic, busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles—in less than 6 hours.

Stark has set out to to bring the top minds in artificial intelligence research together to make self-driving cars a reality. "When a person drives a car, they sense, think, and react without much notice. Programming a computer to do those tasks involves the coordination of vision, state estimation, reasoning, and motion planning in an uncertain environment," said University of Illinois's AI expert Professor Eyal Amir in a press release. "Coupling Team Underdawg's hands-on experience in building functional autonomous cars with the university's expertise in artificial intelligence will result in cars that are safer, more efficient, and more reliable."

To read more about the DARPA 2007 Urban Challenge, click here.