Where pose goes, nobody knows

We had a bunch of people come to Cornell to visit yesterday and provide feedback on our system design and test plan (a bit like a critical design review). Anyway, one of these fellows had the nifty suggestion of evaluating the fused GPS / INS system (the thing that tells our car where it is) by plotting it against one of the new fancy-schmancy mapping programs. I spent a few hours doing that this morning, and here is a sample of the results:

I made this using the filtered output of the pose estimator (currently rate gyros + accelerometers + GPS) dumped into Microsoft's Virtual Earth. This is what a nice tightly-coupled pose estimator can do, when GPS is not allowed to run rampant by itself. The result is a very smooth, very accurate, non bridge-seeking system.

Also, our steering actuator setup has apparently been nicknamed "two bolts and a dude." I don't know what that means exactly, but at least the guys who are building it do.