Sunday, August 12, 2007

All right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right all right, ok now ladies



Actual tale of the Golem: we survived the latest cut of DARPA Urban Challenge teams to 36 teams and will advance to the semifinals.

We weren't at all sure that we would make it, since our site visit from DARPA did not go well. (We had about four unexpected bugs: one for each of the four test runs that DARPA asked us to do.) As evidence of the stiffness of the competition, it appears that the team from Raytheon Missile Systems and iRobot did not make the semifinals despite receiving million-dollar Track A DARPA funding. Such heavyweights as the team from UC Berkeley and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics did not make the semifinals either. So we consider ourselves lucky.

The DARPA Urban Challenge will be held at the Army's urban operations training facility at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Our team members, family members, and "representatives" are banned from the area until October 24...

4 Comments:

At 7:04 PM, August 12, 2007, Blogger badmomgoodmom said...

Whew! How can Iris score an invite to the semifinals?

 
At 10:42 PM, August 12, 2007, Blogger Richard Mason said...

Iris is welcome any time!

If this year is like previous years, there will be bleachers open to the public, where anyone can sit and watch the robots come out one at a time and run through some kind of obstacle course.

The pits, where one can see all the robots up close, are not entirely open to the public, but we'll have something like ten transferable visitor passes, so we can bring in ten people at a time.

In practice, I doubt we'll have any shortage of visitor passes.

Worst case scenario, if everyone we know drives the 90 miles to Victorville on the same day, they'll just have to tour the pits in shifts.

 
At 8:34 AM, August 16, 2007, Blogger Richard Mason said...

Update: It looks like they won't bother with the visitor passes this year. Instead, visitors just need to be accompanied by a team member when they go through the pit area.

 
At 9:38 PM, August 20, 2007, Blogger Ashbloem said...

Well done, sir!

 

Post a Comment

<< Home