Simulating Terramax

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.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life gives you a mission ops building struck by lightning, with electric garage doors that can't be closed, you make do with what you have:

Hey, it sufficed in a pinch, at least until we could get power back. Everything is back to normal these days... mission ops, the deer herd, etc. The one other thing worth mentioning is that there was a police auction at the depot this weekend. I didn't actually attend, but I am told it broke all the laws of economics. They were getting rid of police cruisers on the cheap (super cheap). I wanted to get one for a traffic vehicle, but I suppose even our sketch factor has its limits. We did pick up a little beauty that we'll be using to simulate Terramax (by far the largest of the DUC entries):

They tell me that this truck runs... a real treat to drive. Considering my track record with burning clutches, I think I won't be driving this one. The cost? A whopping $325. Score.

Lightning never strikes twice

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.

We all know the old saying, that lightning never hits the same place twice. After today, I might count my lucky stars and stay in the same building forever. You might guess what transpired; it was, for the most part, a typical day. We said we'd get the car out by noon, and one bug led to another, and then it was 6pm. By the time the car got out driving it was already starting to rain (outside our building; the rain in our building hadn't started yet), but it wasn't raining too bad. A few minutes into the run brought a veritable hurricane to bear on our little neck of the woods... hail, sheets of rain, the works. The few of us in mission ops went to peek out the door to investigate, when a gigantic bolt of lightning seared the building antenna- about 50 feet from our faces. I've never felt my insides squirm like that before, nor have I had all of my hairs stand on end at once- not even when we took our car to 35mph two years ago.

The shop lines are now reading 19 volts... I guess we're lucky that the car was outside and unplugged.

More fun with naming

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.

So... finding the right log file is somewhat of a challenge when you get to pick between the following files:

"continuous sh*t.log"
"triggered sh*t.log"
"xcontinuous sh*t.log"
"speed log.log"

Maybe I'm just asking for too much when I ask for dates and times, but who knows? Oh, and for the record, the radars changed names again. Somebody wired them backwards... so A, B, and C became E, F, and G. At least we added driv0 .. driv2 and pass0 .. pass2 to clear things up. I sincerely hope that our car is not as confused as the poor fools building it.

Naming the radars

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.

You've been reading about how we're adding all kinds of sensors on our car to cover bizarre intersection and merging geometries. Part of that little fiasco involves hiding 7 radars on the car, all in the bumper. I give credit to our mechanical guys for making sure the Tahoe still looks like a Tahoe after mounting all that crap. Of course the problem with having so many of the same sensor on the car is that you have to figure out which sensor is talking when one of them pipes up... so, we had a sensor naming party. Here are some of the candidate naming conventions that didn't make the cut (but sadly, were mentioned):

1, 3, 5, 9, ...
Delaware, Oklahoma, California, ...
A, B, C, ...
Left, Left of Left, Left of Left of Left, ...
Center, Center Left, Left, Left Left, Left Left Left, ...
C, CL, CLL, CLLL, ...

And despite all these "fantastic" choices, here is what we settled on:

RADAR_A_LEFT2, RADAR_B_LEFT1, RADAR_C_LEFT2, RADAR_D_CENTER, ...

Beats me... I just work here. Seriously, though, someone should consider making something like a baby name book- for sensors.

The white deer chronicles

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.

First, before we get to anything else, I'd just like to say:

CONGRATS ON BEING INVITED TO THE NQE!

Great job everybody, now get back to work.

Anyway... I've been letting this slip for awhile, so I need to mention it. I think probably the weirdest part about our adventures here at the army depot (aside from the environmental cleanups, buildings that rain inside, ore piles, abandoned hospitals, and the whole car-driving-itself thing) is the herd of white deer that call this place home. Yeah, white deer. This place is apparently famous for them, as you can check out on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Army_Depot

I've been trying to figure out their favorite spots (a challenging estimation problem that rivals the whole obstacle tracking thing), and I finally got some decent pictures of a particularly curious one:
I'll try to post more as I get them, but these buggers run awfully fast.

Micro-management

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.

Everybody who follows this little amalgamation of words with any kind of regularity already knows that we've been systematically rewriting all our systems for competition. The move from rev. 1.0 to rev 2.0 (or 1.1, or whatever you want to call it) in the software is an important one, because it lets you fix all the assumptions that turn out not to work so well in real life. The latest system to receive some good old-fashioned Team Cornell TLC is the computer rack, because we don't want to go driving around too much longer with wooden 2x6's supporting a rack of umpteen bajillion computers. Going along with that is rev. 2.0 of the microcontrollers, which talk to all the sensors on the car and ferry information onto the car's network for the computers. This year the microcontrollers are all synchronized together in something like a vehicle heartbeat, which allows us to get excellent synchronization across the sensors. You wouldn't think timing would be that much of a problem, but then again you probably haven't realized that even a single minus sign in the code sends the car off the road. In fact, just about everything sends an autonomous car off the road, so it's often necessary to invoke the gods of good fortune and fast reflexes when the car goes out. Anyway, the new microcontrollers all flash tiny lights to this heartbeat, and they stack up into something that could only have come from Star Trek:

By the way, one of our own opened a *.gif file casually yesterday, only to find a popup message box saying something about "Elmo" and no image. If you ever want to watch six terrified guys simultaneously yank plugs out of their computers, that's certainly one way to do it. It turned out not to be a virus, but I think it would be funny if some team had to withdraw from the competition because their car got spywared.

And one more thing... DARPA is announcing the list of semi-finalists (those invited to the National Qualifying Event) on Thursday 8/09/07 at 1:45 pm. Start biting your fingernails, and wish us luck!

Quoth the raven: no more ore!

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.

We took the car back outside yesterday for the first drive test with our new super-hot optimizing planner. Actually, it was even scarier than that, because we were running with the new posterior pose and a new route planner too. Generally it's not such a good idea to roll out that many *cough* thousands of lines of new code at once, but for whatever reason it was teh hotness yesterday. In short, our route planner, local planner (tracks paths and stays in lanes), and our positioning are all a lot better and more general than before. For one thing we aren't just blindly following lines anymore, but now we're actually searching for feasible paths that are smooth and comfortable (or at least they are when everything is working the way it should). In essence, the car is looking for humanlike paths.

Of course, the fact that the car is looking for humanlike paths doesn't necessarily mean it's doing so in the same way we do it... that is, unless you solve nonlinear optimization problems ten times a second when you drive.

And so our car drives, always daring,
Still it goes, and yet we're caring,
Are the union workers faring,
Faring well removing ore?

And so we test while they go loading,
Large Mack trucks seem so foreboding,
And the crane destroys our roading,
'Til the chief says, no more ore!

What, I can't take a little poetic license every once in awhile? Ok, so Poe might be rolling over in his grave, but that doesn't deny the fact that there are a bunch of workers here this week cleaning up the place. Normally my OCD would get me all excited about people cleaning things up, but this time it's a bit weirder because it's an environmental cleanup effort happening right outside our door. Apparently the depot used to store strategic ore reserves (iron, chromium, etc.), which have now thoroughly contaminated the ground around here (read the EPA report, if you dare). Nowadays the EPA wants to turn this place into a wildlife refuge, so they're going back and cleaning the place up. For us this apparently means massive dump trucks and cranes digging up huge fields of weird looking stuff and carting it off to some mystery location.

More practice for the obstacle tracker, I guess.