<p><a href="http://pave.princeton.edu/main/%5B/url%5D">http://pave.princeton.edu/main/</a> = website created by the student engineers</p>
<p>Princeton undergraduates who have engineered a self-driving car designed to navigate city streets without human help have been selected as semifinalists in a hotly contested Pentagon competition with top prizes worth $3.5 million.</p>
<p>The Princeton team was among 36 semifinalists named last week by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in its "Urban Challenge" -- a competition whose purpose is to spur innovation in autonomous robotic vehicles.</p>
<p>The Princeton team is unique among the other competitors in that it is entirely an undergraduate-led effort and receives little assistance from outside industry, according to team spokesman Gordon Franken.</p>
<p>"The fabulous thing about Princeton is that it is a place where a group of undergraduates can go out and enter a national competition like this," said Franken. "At another university, we may not have had the opportunity to be involved at all or we would have been working for graduate students or professors."</p>
<p>The Princeton team operates on what is comparatively a shoestring budget -- so far it has spent about $75,000 while many other teams have corporate sponsorship and budgets of $1 million or more.</p>