Adventures at the Urban Challenge Participants' Conference

We just got back from the Urban Challenge Participants' Conference, held in Reston, VA. Aside from getting old veterans together to share war stories, the conference intended to clarify some rules of the Urban Challenge. From the conference, it became evident that the vehicles' priorities are 1. avoid collisions, 2. achieve missions, 3. obey traffic laws. Can anyone say autonomous demolition derby?

Oh, but that was only the beginning. In true CUDGC fashion, we left Ithaca for Reston at 7pm on Friday, about 2 hours after we'd intended to leave. We stopped for gas in middle-of-nowhere, PA, where we promptly filled up the tank for $80. Ouch. Not to worry though, we bought the gas courtesy of Acute Dream, Aaron's company (which consists of a single employee: Aaron). Feeling that we might not find another restaurant for awhile (hey, it was eastern Pennsylvania), we decided to stop for dinner. At Krispy Kreme. Ironically, it was the same Krispy Kreme we'd visited back in August as we returned from our first month in the desert.

Things went fine until we encountered road blocks at I-83 near Harrisburg, where our "avoid all tolls" MapQuest directions sent us traipsing about the southeastern Pennsylvania countryside.
That would have been fine, except our directions took us through some seriously shady cop-filled areas (cops with guns drawn and everything); the back seat constantly rang out with 3 peoples' calls of "po po po po po." 5 hours later we stumbled into the Hyatt Regency in Reston, at 2:30am. The entrance could not have been more appropriate. We pulled up into the little valet circle of the Hyatt Regency in Noah's Suburban:

The poor valet looked us over, clearly fearing for his life. As Pete opened the door, a small mountain of trash fell out onto the ground (along with 6 scraggly-looking college kids). We went to the front desk to check in, where we found out that the Hyatt had overbooked and did not have rooms for us! They gave us free rooms at a Marriott that was supposedly "just down the street." An hour and several more "po po's" later we stumbled into the Marriott. By this time it was about 3:30am, so we nearly lost it when we found out the Marriott only had rooms with single king-sized beds. I must say, four-star hotel or not, the couch is not a comfortable place to sleep. At least we got 3 hours of sleep and a free breakfast though, which helped ease the pain of last night's dinner, which for me consisted of 2 granola bars and some Ritz crackers. The conference went just fine:

We met a lot of contacts, including a guy from Daimler-Chrysler. How's an autonomous Mercedes sound to you? One word: hot.

Oh, and my favorite quote from Tony Tether, director of DARPA:

"This is Washington, and logic does not prevail."

The bottom line: when you click "avoid tolls" on MapQuest, you do so at your own risk.