The Storm Trooper

Well, we've been having a lot of arguments lately. Not bad arguments, mind you, just design arguments. It comes primarily down to sensing, where there are two major lines of thought. One advocates buying and gimbaling a few particularly expensive sensors that will definitely get the job done (though may give a bunch of unneeded data as well), and the other advocates buying a bunch of very cheap sensors and mounting them everywhere. Neither choice affects our sensor fusion algorithm in the slightest, but let's face it, nobody likes cutting big checks.

Anyway, by far the strangest of the sensors is the "Storm Trooper:"

which is approximately equivalent to four single-scan LIDARs (modulo some minor caveats). The one in the picture is a small field-of-view version that we're demoing at the moment (that's right, they actually make one with a larger field of view). The sensor does exactly what it claims to do (a rarity in itself), though it would be a very expensive mistake to lose it in a crash.

Incidentally, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation (demoing a sensor while driving around, that is), I highly recommend that you mount the display monitor in the forward direction. For us, Prof. Huttenlocher and I sat in the middle of three rows of seats looking at an LCD screen sitting in the back seat, which depicted a sensor mounted on the front of a forward moving vehicle. I definitely achieved new levels of motion sickness on that ride.

Also, Professor Huttenlocher is no longer allowed to park the Suburban: