Bedknobs and bumper replacements

So... a LOT of things happened last week. Of the five weekdays that went by, I think I ended up eating dinner after midnight for no less than three of them. We had three guests from Singapore, Dr. Koh, Jason, and Hikaru. This is what they look like after a multi-day flight over the North Pole:

Jason and Hikaru will be coming back to work with us, as soon as they get student visas.

We also had demos from several sensors companies. Anthony from Velodyne brought over a fancy 2D LIDAR. I say fancy because the 1D LIDARs that we used last year only scan along one line of laser every time they record. The Velodyne scans 32 lines at each data step, and even has better resolution in each line than the 1D sensors. Anthony brought a demo unit, so we gave it the "Noah Special" (i.e. we whipped up a sketchy last-minute mount to our test vehicle):

Despite weighing 40 lbs. or so, it did actually stay on the roof of the Suburban. A good thing too, because it would've been a very costly $75K mistake if we'd dropped it. If you look carefully at that picture, you can also see a fancy 1D LIDAR + camera mount that Pete conjured up for the Suburban's front bumper. Those sensors were originally supposed to be mounted to a "Ranch Hand," a delightfully overbuilt bumper replacement for the Suburban (used mostly for clearing cattle out of the way). Unfortunately the "Ranch Hand" manufacturers discovered a slight wrinkle in the plan- they don't produce it anymore. This startling discovery came after a disturbingly long series of events, which included money changing hands and several calls to dealers and the manufacturer for the aforementioned "Ranch Hand."

Oh yeah, and we got some vehicles. I'm not exactly sure why that news got lost in the shuffle, so my only excuse is that we really were that busy. Anyway, they are a '99 Suburban for testing and general demolishing, and a brand new 2007 Tahoe for the competition: