Closing time

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.
DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

I don't really want to write this post, because when I put in the final period, it'll really all be over. And yet here we are, and it really is all over- no more Monday bullsh*t sessions (systems meetings), no more rampant cursing, no more white deer, no more psychopathic walks, and no more cars without drivers. I feel almost like I've lost a very close friend, and I'm not quite willing to believe he's gone.

I know I've said this already (and I hate to belabor a point), but what we have done is nothing short of amazing. I think people are finally starting to recognize it, too. We drove the Tahoe back to Cornell last week (under cover of darkness... one last sketchy thing) and parked it outside one of the main Engineering buildings. I figured I'd sit there bored, but instead I spent the entire day explaining to people that yes, really, this car could drive itself. We set up a little console and played logs for people, showing some nice passes, intersections, and that awful double loop of Ford Taurses.

It's nice to be able to speak about it fancifully, as if it only happened in a dream. It's far weirder to do a double take and realize that there were no camera tricks, that only two and a half weeks ago I was actually sitting in that California wasteland putting all my innumerable calculations to the test. And then if there were a cake of weirdness, so to speak, it would certainly be taken by the fact that all those calculations actually did what they were supposed to do.

So what happens next? Well, in the fallout and aftermath (NO MORE MATH, PLEASE!) of the Urban Challenge I somehow have a few billion papers to write, and we're all celebrities (of a very weird sort) on campus. Everybody wants to hear about the journey, and I do love to tell it. Some stories I keep to myself, though, for my own private collection of laughs. For those of us that lived it, there are just some things that can't quite be put to words: spirit naps, operational crashes, the wide stance, Parking McGhee, the racing stripe, Hammox, the DARPA Urban Helpdesk, the participants' conference, and the sign we used to keep on the door to our lab. At this point, it really is starting to feel like the end to a bad 80's movie, where we'd show pictures of everybody with little snippets about what they'll be doing with themselves in the years to come. To make a long story short I'll just say that the team is scattered to the winds. Still, I have a feeling that as long as there is an ethernet cable between us, there is a decent possibility that our paths may cross again sometime in the future. I, for one, have no plans of retiring my "Mr. Fusion" nickname.

To my team I will say this: that you fellows are the best and brightest I have or will ever know. When I was shamelessly dragging my advisor onto the project way back in the beginning I told him that I'd stake my professional reputation on you fellows eighty times over, and I'm glad everybody got the chance to see why. I hope those close to you are proud and show it, and I wish you all the best of luck in the years to come. I've been asked to close with a particular verse taken from Timothy 2: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

#26 forever.

fin.

My snowball's chance

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.

DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort.  Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

Well, here I am, writing this penultimate blog post on my "laptop" (a notebook, a piece of paper, and a pen).  It feels strange, abandoning my role of "Mr. Fusion" for the less interesting position of "bystander" in a little less than 24 hours.  On second thought, maybe it feels strange because it feels so normal, sitting here on this curb and reflecting on the adventure that is rapidly coming to a close.  The conversations are already starting to drift: segways, robotics, frisbees, Mexico, and already the words "urban" and "challenge" are popping up less and less.

For those that didn't follow yesterday, I will give a quick recap.  The starts went well, with a few GPS hiccups for CMU and a quick restart for IVS.  As the competition got underway we were joined by Jamie and Grant of the Mythbusters, who did their best to guess what the heck was going on in our robots throughout the day.  There were a few near misses: CMU vs. Terramax, CarOLO vs. MIT (twice, believe it or not), MIT vs. us (which still remains the only crash in which no drivers took part), and a number of cars had some run-ins with other less animate objects like curbs, gates, and houses.  It's like I've been saying all along: there were countless bajillion permutations of yesterday that would've ended in disaster, but only one in which things went right.  Still, and fortunately for us, yesterday was one of those precious few days where more things went right than wrong.  We ended up finishing the course- all 58 frickin' miles of autonomous driving (or at least, so said our odometer).  Some things still went wrong: the camera spewed bad timestamps, pose had a few hiccups, and something went funky on our throttle actuator.  The last of those was by far the worst, as it reduced our top speed to about 6 mph, which, as it turns out, is not so good for running a race.  That took us way out of contending range for any of the trophies (we probably had the slowest overall time), but we still finished.  I'll take that any day- it shows exactly what hard work and dedication are good for.  That's a lesson I think everybody should take home: that you really can do anything if you put your mind to it.  And even if there are still some people out there who were frustrated by yesterday or even by NQE, at least I hope you will one day be proud of what you've done.  For this 3.5 year odyssey of mine, I sure can say it was worth it.

Very little now remains of the competition site: a few of those blasted concrete barriers that everybody hated so much, and the occasional truck that carts more of them away.  All the Tauruses are gone, and there are no more sirens to be heard.  I'll give one last shout out to our neighbors and friends, the Honeywell / IVS team and Team CajunBot, for proving that sometimes even your "enemies" at competition can turn out to be good friends.  In the end, I think we can all agree on that, because if nothing else, we all ended up on this crazy adventure together.  At the awards ceremony one of my teammates remarked that this felt a bit like the end to a cheesy 80's movie, and it almost does.  I feel like the only thing that's missing is for everybody to jump up and freeze-frame, but since that can't happen, I suppose we'll just have to commit all this to memory and move on to the next journey.

And, since the Honeywell / IVS guy keep bugging me, I'll just give a quick and shameless plug to Delphi radars: their team may flood your pit with car exhaust, but they sure make a darn good radar.  I'll make sure to pass that message along to my kids, assuming I'm not infertile from all the laser and radar radiation I've picked up over the past year.

Anyway, I think that just about wraps up everything I have to say about the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.  I'll give just one more quick nod to those at NQE, those in the finals, and especially those who finished: CMU, Stanford, VT, Ben Franklin, MIT, and of course us.  I think I'll have one more hand to play (i.e. I'll be posting here once more) with closing reflections, but it will have to wait until I get back to Ithaca.  In the meantime I'll just sum up everybody's feelings with one last story.  Dr. Norm Whitaker (project manager for the Urban Challenge) leaned over to us yesterday after we finished.  He asked, "so, what're you guys going to do next?"  Our reply was simple: "we dunno, you tell us."

The story of my so-called life

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.

DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

For the past few days I feel like I've been living in a dream. For one, I think I've seen more moving cars without drivers than with. I've become accustomed to that (admittedly even grown to like it), so it feels weird that everything is rushing rapidly to whatever end might be in store. I've gotten a lot of people asking to meet me, some to talk about the tracking and pose estimation we've implemented (I think the running total is four interested companies). Ironically, the vast majority of the people I've met have all asked to meet me because I write this little blog segment, which I suppose means that the goofy crap that happens to us also happens to everybody else. As they say, misery loves company, no?

As polished as some of this stuff looks, I've definitely learned that we have a long way to go before we turn the wheels over to the bitters and the byters. I guess the thing that's difficult for passers-by to realize is that these cars lack the ability to learn: they only know exactly what they've been programmed. If one of these cars changes lanes or makes a turn smoothly, it's because some dedicated zealot stayed up late one night tuning the crazy thing until it looked just so. That's what makes it just as much a labor of love as anything else- the perfect example of art imitating life.

So that's what casual passers-by should take from all this. What have I (we) learned? If there were one single lesson to wrap everything up into a concise little package it would be this: that no matter how absurd some of these scenarios may be, the bad ones always seem to find a way to happen. Those who were new to the team learned that a few days ago with the IMU. And then there was today, just in case anybody was starting to forget.

DARPA ran practice starts today as a sort of dress rehearsal for tomorrow. I'm glad they did, because the Fates definitely conspired against everybody and against all odds this morning. All the cars lined up in the start chutes, in much closer proximity than they'd ever been. That may have been unrelated, but that was definitely only the beginning. The first car went out on the course, only to get stuck and start backing up. The second car refused to leave its start chute. The third car went out and drove in the wrong lane before being paused.

That was only the beginning. OmniSTAR, who provides the high-precision differential correction signal that everybody uses for positioning, apparently decided to do a firmware update this morning, of all times and all days. A few minutes later we realized one of our lasers had stopped spinning (permanently, I am sad to say), which brings the total expense incurred from broken sensors to about $126000. Ouch.

And so here we are, the day before competition. The Tahoe's front bumper lies quietly in the corner, part of something once beautiful now grotesquely dislocated. Nobody's worried- this is exactly how these things are supposed to go. I explain it like this: there's about eight bajillion permutations in which something goes wrong, and only one in which everything goes right. Besides, if everything went smoothly, the story would be boring.

Denouement

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.
DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

It seems that NQE is drawing to a close. The schedule got rather honked up today, with a lot of teams running at a moment's notice on so many parts of the NQE course. I feel bad for MIT, who apparently ran no less than five times today (we ran twice yesterday and I was exhausted). A lot of teams are packing up and leaving, which saddens me a little. I've never really thought of the Urban Challenge as a race of robot vs. robot; to me, it's always been us dealing with whatever DARPA thinks is the next big step that needs to be made in this field. Heck, if the evil army of synchronized Ford Tauruses doesn't make everybody else think that, then I don't know what will. I, for one, will never look at a Ford Taurus the same way again.

Since I wrote about our first little adventure in Taurus-land a few days ago, we've had another three successful runs. The first was in heart attack C (well, DARPA calls it Area C, but I think my name is more appropriate). Heart attack C tests intersection precedence: four way stops, where you have to figure out when it's your turn to go. It's very obvious when you make a mistake, and it's almost always my fault when we do. Thankfully we nailed intersection dead on- something that looks absolutely amazing in the video I took of it. When that was finished DARPA started putting blockages in the road... we're supposed to detect them and plan a new route. The orange barrels were fine (I'm from Ohio, and they're our state flower anyway), but one section of the course was blocked by an absolutely diabolical horizontal metal bar with stop signs bolted across it. As our car was running I was nervously zooming in on the stop signs with my camcorder, trying to figure out if the stop signs were low enough for our sensors to see them. It was a tense moment... those who saw me bouncing around and repeatedly pounding out trumpet finger positions for chromatic scales with both my hands could attest to how nervous I was. But then, as if by some great force of magic, the brake lights fired up, the car halted, and then it executed one of the most welcomed and beautiful three point turns I've ever seen it do. My mom said she was getting too old for this... I think I am too.

We ran Area B again- the endurance run that goes in and out of parking lots and around little groups of houses long since uninhabited. I still don't want to say what's back there, but now mostly because I don't want to remember it. And then of course we ran Area A again, with the two lanes of Ford Tauruses of doom. With so much time and effort put into this car of ours, I don't think I can take much more of this.

Anyway, everybody out here is exhausted. It's the kind of thing where we're all afraid to admit just how much this car means to us, because nobody wants to admit that seeing it get wrecked up will be absolutely devastating. Still, with the chaos of the final race (the NQE runs have all been one autonomous vehicle vs. the human Ford Tauruses), I think the probability of bad things happening is woefully high. My advisor once told me that for a guy who makes his career studying probability, I sure get screwed a lot. It's definitely true... and usually I'm conservative enough that I'd rather not know certain things than know them for fear of disappointment. For this one, though, I think we have to go all in. I had a fortune cookie last night with the message "it's not the end yet, let's stay with it."

Then again, I also had a fortune cookie a few days ago with the message, "when the moment comes, take the top one."

Trial by tire -or- trouble in DARPAville

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.
DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

...And here we find ourselves at NQE. I know it's been a long time since I've written, but NQE has been super hectic. Things were a bit disorganized at first, but I think DARPA has done an exceptional job keeping things very safe and very controlled. After all, each of us has put his blood, sweat, and tears into these cars, and we'd all hate to see them destroyed.

So what has happened? Well, we arrived on Thursday (maybe... I've kinda lost track of what day it is exactly). We set up camp in our puny pit area, gratiously supplied with nothing... no power, no water, no shelter, and some porta-potties that seem to run out of everything entirely too fast. I toured around all the cars, trying to talk to as many people as possible. I met some fantastic folks from UCF, Virginia Tech, Insight Racing, and many others, and I caught up with some good old friends over at Teams Cajunbot and Caltech. I like hearing everybody's stories about their cars- you know, the things the media never asks about. That's what makes a venue like this so unique, because all of us techies can really understand and appreciate some of the difficult things each of us has accomplished. I would post pictures (I will eventually), but unfortunately I'm currently pulling my internet connection off a cellular modem connected to a laptop that has been stepped on, dropped, vibrated and heated to death on the DGC '05 generator, and I believe even run over. Needless to say, the connection is not so good.

We've run twice so far- once each in two out of the three NQE areas. We didn't make it through area B- a basic navigation run, for one legitimate reason and one stupid reason. We've promised not to give details of what happened exactly, since the course is not visible to the public. We drove well and failed safely though, so I'm hoping DARPA will consider that as NQE progresses.

Area A was a heart attack waiting to happen- a circle of bi-directional traffic into which our car had to merge repeatedly. The traffic was supplied by DARPA- a fleet of specially-outfitted Ford Tauruses driven by professional stunt drivers, no less. The whole thing is very eerie... concrete barriers and vehicle sirens drown out the Taurus' engines, and the stunt drivers are all very synchronized. It gives of the distinct impression of being a creepy carnival ride starting and stopping, so much so that I think it would be complete with a little slow waltz or circus music in some minor key. The situation is very difficult to merge into, with very tight tolerances required to avoid the evil fleet of Tauruses on your left and some menacing concrete barriers on the right. I had a terrible night sleeping last night, thinking, 'frick, the car's gonna crash, the car's gonna crash...' and then waking up and whirling about how this or that under some impossibly unlikely situation would cause our car to destroy its front bumper- a $28000 mistake. To top that all off the entire course is very small and completely visible to the public, so you just have to sit there and sweat bullets while it's all happening. It's the kind of thing that excites morbid curiosity: you don't want to watch, but you just have to do it anyway.

Well, to cut a long story short, our car made it through. (!) We didn't cause a single accident (the DARPA drivers prevent accidents, but honk if they would've occurred). We checked the data logs- we came within 20 cm of the concrete barrier at one point (make fists with your hands and stack them one on top of another: that's about 20 cm). I'm glad the guys told me about that *after* the run was over, because otherwise I'd have to go change my pants. Still, it's pretty slick (*cough* scary *cough*) that the planner knows its boundaries that well.

I need to run to dinner now, but I want to let any competitors know that they've all done amazing jobs with their cars- trust me, I looked. The media might not appreciate or even care about those multi-month technical accomplishments hiding in each one of our tamed behemoths, but I sure do.

My four leaf clover

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.
DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

Someone once said to me that the only certain thing in life is that nothing is certain; that the key to living a happy life is to leave every norm and expectation behind, to sway back and forth in the aether of life like a blade of grass in the wind.

I am trying to do that, despite the absurdity of it all. Of late we are bordered by an ominous conflagration- you've probably seen it if you've looked at CNN recently. It is not threatening to burn us down, but it is closing all the nearby roads. Perhaps more devastating is the fact that half our planning team is asleep in bed with pneumonia; we wish him a safe and speedy recovery. There are other problems: equipment failures, broken locks, and the like, all threatening to shut us down. It seems improbable if not impossible, except for the fact that we are all here living it.

Yet somehow, I think I'm ok with it. Not that I or anyone else on the team has given up, more that each of us is psyched up for everything to work despite all the setbacks. I think that's my four leaf clover: at the end of the ride, it's going to be one hell of a story.

EE for a day

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.
DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort. Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

If you had to guess... what's the worst thing that could break on the car right before competition? Something that's impossible to repair, impossible to replace, outrageously expensive, reliable for several years of use, and absolutely critical for the car to drive... Something that everybody on our team has joked about when writing code... "well, if that broke we'd be up a creek for everything else anyway, so we shouldn't even consider it." Something that's military grade, the heartbeat of the car, the thing that's supposed to run for years before breaking... you know, the thing that's never supposed to stop working.

Well, it broke.

Believe it. Oh yes, that's right, and Murphy stopped by for another visit yesterday, inviting all his gremlins and kilroy and whatnot along for the ride.

The car has (ok, had) two pulses; synchronized and harmonious, and literally bringing order to everything else on the car. Midmorning yesterday one of those pulses shuddered, convulsed, went flatline, and was pronounced dead a few hours later. *sob* ...no joke.

So I got to play electrical engineer for a day, helping hands for our real EE trying desperately to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. Sadly we tore the car apart- scoping this, probing that, fiddling with things that hadn't been fiddled in months. *sigh* and that's the way it goes. Last competition we changed a transmission at the qualifying event- a whole day's job that somehow magically worked. I called that blog post "transmission impossible." Now we're spoofing the second heartbeat off the one good one still beating, and praying that whoever it was upstairs that liked us so much last time around still feels our pain. I think I will call this little episode "position impossible," because it describes exactly what stopped working. I suppose "repetition impossible" would also be appropriate.