My snowball's chance

DISCLAIMER: the opinionated political satire expressed here is in no way affiliated or aligned with the views of Cornell University.

DISCLAIMER: the technical investigations of this team should in no way be perceived as anything but a dedicated and rigorous research effort.  Please do not reproduce or otherwise make available any portion of the material found within unless permission is obtained from the author first.

Well, here I am, writing this penultimate blog post on my "laptop" (a notebook, a piece of paper, and a pen).  It feels strange, abandoning my role of "Mr. Fusion" for the less interesting position of "bystander" in a little less than 24 hours.  On second thought, maybe it feels strange because it feels so normal, sitting here on this curb and reflecting on the adventure that is rapidly coming to a close.  The conversations are already starting to drift: segways, robotics, frisbees, Mexico, and already the words "urban" and "challenge" are popping up less and less.

For those that didn't follow yesterday, I will give a quick recap.  The starts went well, with a few GPS hiccups for CMU and a quick restart for IVS.  As the competition got underway we were joined by Jamie and Grant of the Mythbusters, who did their best to guess what the heck was going on in our robots throughout the day.  There were a few near misses: CMU vs. Terramax, CarOLO vs. MIT (twice, believe it or not), MIT vs. us (which still remains the only crash in which no drivers took part), and a number of cars had some run-ins with other less animate objects like curbs, gates, and houses.  It's like I've been saying all along: there were countless bajillion permutations of yesterday that would've ended in disaster, but only one in which things went right.  Still, and fortunately for us, yesterday was one of those precious few days where more things went right than wrong.  We ended up finishing the course- all 58 frickin' miles of autonomous driving (or at least, so said our odometer).  Some things still went wrong: the camera spewed bad timestamps, pose had a few hiccups, and something went funky on our throttle actuator.  The last of those was by far the worst, as it reduced our top speed to about 6 mph, which, as it turns out, is not so good for running a race.  That took us way out of contending range for any of the trophies (we probably had the slowest overall time), but we still finished.  I'll take that any day- it shows exactly what hard work and dedication are good for.  That's a lesson I think everybody should take home: that you really can do anything if you put your mind to it.  And even if there are still some people out there who were frustrated by yesterday or even by NQE, at least I hope you will one day be proud of what you've done.  For this 3.5 year odyssey of mine, I sure can say it was worth it.

Very little now remains of the competition site: a few of those blasted concrete barriers that everybody hated so much, and the occasional truck that carts more of them away.  All the Tauruses are gone, and there are no more sirens to be heard.  I'll give one last shout out to our neighbors and friends, the Honeywell / IVS team and Team CajunBot, for proving that sometimes even your "enemies" at competition can turn out to be good friends.  In the end, I think we can all agree on that, because if nothing else, we all ended up on this crazy adventure together.  At the awards ceremony one of my teammates remarked that this felt a bit like the end to a cheesy 80's movie, and it almost does.  I feel like the only thing that's missing is for everybody to jump up and freeze-frame, but since that can't happen, I suppose we'll just have to commit all this to memory and move on to the next journey.

And, since the Honeywell / IVS guy keep bugging me, I'll just give a quick and shameless plug to Delphi radars: their team may flood your pit with car exhaust, but they sure make a darn good radar.  I'll make sure to pass that message along to my kids, assuming I'm not infertile from all the laser and radar radiation I've picked up over the past year.

Anyway, I think that just about wraps up everything I have to say about the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.  I'll give just one more quick nod to those at NQE, those in the finals, and especially those who finished: CMU, Stanford, VT, Ben Franklin, MIT, and of course us.  I think I'll have one more hand to play (i.e. I'll be posting here once more) with closing reflections, but it will have to wait until I get back to Ithaca.  In the meantime I'll just sum up everybody's feelings with one last story.  Dr. Norm Whitaker (project manager for the Urban Challenge) leaned over to us yesterday after we finished.  He asked, "so, what're you guys going to do next?"  Our reply was simple: "we dunno, you tell us."