The team was pretty down when we returned to the garage yesterday.  But we pulled off a pretty major feat with the technology we deployed.  From the beginning Scott and Doug have emphasized that this was not about the race.  A special purpose system designed for the race (or even just for qualifying) would have been easier.  But the goal was a general purpose platform autonomous land vehicle development. 

Several things stand out in our design.  We have the ability to operate with more precision than almost any other team.  But this presents a challenge for setting and maintaining calibration.  Over the next few weeks I'm guessing we will probably rethink the calibration process. Our distributed architecture has been a huge success.  For both development and troubleshooting it provides high flexibility.  It demands careful time synchronization, and we achieved that after some struggle.  The stabilized platform was also a major contributor to our capabilities.  This technology is unique among the competitors, solves several universal problems in sensor detection, and attracted the attention of many DARPA officials.

In retrospect we will need to rebuild several parts of the software, but the core of our design and execution is very solid.  Within the next couple of months, we will be demonstrating a technology that exceeds anything that came to the DARPA Grand Challenge.  Like many first year racing teams, we weren't quite on top of our game.  We're disappointed we didn't show better, but we're by no means done.