Hang on, let me shift to park

I usually work at home on the weekends. I have a number of reasons for doing so, not least being the improved concentration, quiet, and the drastic reduction in the number of times I hear the words "meatball," "linear systems," "architecture," and every curse word known to mankind. This weekend was by no means an exception to the rule. I had an important architecture decision to ponder, and I really needed to think about all the ramifications of learning the road structure in a factorized form vs. learning it all simultaneously (incidentally, this is part of what I call scene estimation, for those who are curious).

Anyway, the weekend was almost business as usual. I showered, jumped into my pajamas, and sat down to eat as I watched the NBC lineup from Thursday. I was halfway through an apple when I got the call to go testing. I got dressed, splashed some lemon juice on the half-eaten apple, and ran out the door.

I arrived at the parking lot to find the Tahoe driving itself(!) Many congratulations go to Noah for successfully disassembling the brand new Tahoe, building the steering actuator, and putting the thing "almost" all the way back together. Kudos also go to Brian for writing RemoteView2, which has several important features over the 2005 version:

1. When the car comes to the end of a path, it does not do donuts.
2. Screen glitches involving large sky-blue triangles no longer appear.

Also, for those who remember, "long path" and "long path 2" made a reappearance. Here are some pictures of the inside of the Tahoe at present:

Poor thing, that used to be a brand new car. You can see the inverter and the power reserve in the foreground, where the middle seat used to be. Here is a picture of the steering actuator:

It's kinda tough to explain what's going on in the picture, but at least I can point you to the black breadbox-sized motor just under the steering column.

Long story short, a lot of people did a lot of good things this weekend. To close, I'll leave you with a quote I heard yesterday evening:

"You know, I feel like we're getting better at this... the whole building autonomous cars thing."

And in case you were curious, I returned home to a perfectly unoxidized apple.