SITE VISIT!

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Sheesh, I really hate writing that at the beginning of everything.

Anyway... Tuesday was our site visit! The weird part of the whole thing is that we were actually ready for it. No last minute scramble, no sleepless nights. Well, at least not for the sake of writing more lines of code, or (and this is purely hypothetical), say, writing the entire sensing system. We actually froze the code at one point, agreeing that we were done modifying it for site visit. Last time around, well, we froze our fingers writing code in the middle of the night... but part of that was because it was still below freezing.

Events leading up to site visit were a bit funny. I wrote awhile back about paying homage to Murphy and his all-accursed law, and I still stand by what I said with a perfect example. Part of the site visit is an e-stop test. The team sets up the vehicle to run in a straight line, it accelerates to 20 mph, and then you hit pause to bring it to a controlled stop. The test is meant to verify that the team can stop the massive hunk of metal from careening out of control if something should go wrong (not like that ever happens). Now keep in mind that we've been comfortable with our vehicle so far, comfortable enough to keep a person at the wheel at all times (hey, the car is worth a lot of money). Still, we knew DARPA wanted to run site visit without anybody in the driver's seat, so we decided to bite the bullet and run a full mock site visit with an empty driver's seat. Off went the driverless vehicle, up to 20 mph, then back down to a stop. Ok, fine. The guys pulled up to the vehicle to drive it to another part of our course.

"Uhh, did you lock the door?"

"No, why?"

"Somebody locked the door."

"Where are the keys?"

"In the car."

"F."

It's that new feature on GM vehicles, the feature that locks the doors automatically when the car drives above 5 mph... I guess GM didn't figure robotic cars into their design. One team member commented that this was the part of The Matrix that they don't tell you about- how robots first started to take over the world by locking people out of their own cars. So anyway, let that be a lesson to all of you avid roboticists- keep a spare set of keys outside the autonomous vehicle, just in case.

All that said, I think our site visit went really well. I won't comment or give specifics (I'm being polite for DARPA), but I was pleased. Here are our cars, looking much calmer than the team members:

And here is one of our team members "celebrating" in one of our beater traffic vehicles after the site visit (we bought several extremely cheap and barely functional vehicles to create fake traffic):

And the aftermath of that brilliant idea:

...scratch one more traffic vehicle. We already lost our rusted out Grand Prix to coolant problems, and now the Dodge Spirit is down for the count as well. Only our Dodge Dakota Sport remains.