High wind and dust devils for most of the day. Gusts to 50 mph. With the fine dust of this desert, it’s like living in a sand blaster. We had a real show late in the day. Thunderstorms coming in over the desert from LA. The sight shut work down on the robot for several hours and sent the entire team scrambling for their cameras.

Multiple breakthroughs today:

#1 - We had successful bench tests of the LIDAR system integration. This was important because we’lleventually have up to 11 of them doing specialized tasks.

#2 - We also found the bug in navigation which had been causing a major error during GPS outages.

#3 - We got the time synch between the 30 computers to within 2 milliseconds. We’re hoping to see less than 1 millisecond error once the system settles down. We installed a fan in the top of the hood to exhaust the heat that was building up because of the extra generator and all the idling we do between tests.

We’re going to have a heavy day of testing on the 20th. We have several courses mapped, and want to see what the brush of the desert looks like to our LIDAR instruments. We also have a new LIDAR system ready totest that detects washboard roads in time to slowdown. Also lots of work cleaning up the the systems (software, hardware, cables) to make them withstand 10 hours of vibration.

We’re really starting to tune things now. Starting to look like we’ll actually be ready with most of the critical technology. It’s an amazing collection of instruments and software.  One week 'til we move from the desert to the speedway for qualifications.