Denouement

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It seems that NQE is drawing to a close. The schedule got rather honked up today, with a lot of teams running at a moment's notice on so many parts of the NQE course. I feel bad for MIT, who apparently ran no less than five times today (we ran twice yesterday and I was exhausted). A lot of teams are packing up and leaving, which saddens me a little. I've never really thought of the Urban Challenge as a race of robot vs. robot; to me, it's always been us dealing with whatever DARPA thinks is the next big step that needs to be made in this field. Heck, if the evil army of synchronized Ford Tauruses doesn't make everybody else think that, then I don't know what will. I, for one, will never look at a Ford Taurus the same way again.

Since I wrote about our first little adventure in Taurus-land a few days ago, we've had another three successful runs. The first was in heart attack C (well, DARPA calls it Area C, but I think my name is more appropriate). Heart attack C tests intersection precedence: four way stops, where you have to figure out when it's your turn to go. It's very obvious when you make a mistake, and it's almost always my fault when we do. Thankfully we nailed intersection dead on- something that looks absolutely amazing in the video I took of it. When that was finished DARPA started putting blockages in the road... we're supposed to detect them and plan a new route. The orange barrels were fine (I'm from Ohio, and they're our state flower anyway), but one section of the course was blocked by an absolutely diabolical horizontal metal bar with stop signs bolted across it. As our car was running I was nervously zooming in on the stop signs with my camcorder, trying to figure out if the stop signs were low enough for our sensors to see them. It was a tense moment... those who saw me bouncing around and repeatedly pounding out trumpet finger positions for chromatic scales with both my hands could attest to how nervous I was. But then, as if by some great force of magic, the brake lights fired up, the car halted, and then it executed one of the most welcomed and beautiful three point turns I've ever seen it do. My mom said she was getting too old for this... I think I am too.

We ran Area B again- the endurance run that goes in and out of parking lots and around little groups of houses long since uninhabited. I still don't want to say what's back there, but now mostly because I don't want to remember it. And then of course we ran Area A again, with the two lanes of Ford Tauruses of doom. With so much time and effort put into this car of ours, I don't think I can take much more of this.

Anyway, everybody out here is exhausted. It's the kind of thing where we're all afraid to admit just how much this car means to us, because nobody wants to admit that seeing it get wrecked up will be absolutely devastating. Still, with the chaos of the final race (the NQE runs have all been one autonomous vehicle vs. the human Ford Tauruses), I think the probability of bad things happening is woefully high. My advisor once told me that for a guy who makes his career studying probability, I sure get screwed a lot. It's definitely true... and usually I'm conservative enough that I'd rather not know certain things than know them for fear of disappointment. For this one, though, I think we have to go all in. I had a fortune cookie last night with the message "it's not the end yet, let's stay with it."

Then again, I also had a fortune cookie a few days ago with the message, "when the moment comes, take the top one."