Our first full day of activity at the California Motor Speedway.  Joy and Brandon escorted IRV down for the Opening Ceremony.  DARPA lines all of the robotic vehicles up for a group photo.  Take a look at the panoramic photo below... simply move your cursor from side-to-side to scroll through the image.

Our first event was the safety inspection.  We passed the static test quickly and moved on to the dynamic test area.  We were fully confident because we had practiced this test in the desert.  But today was different.  Hard-right turn and aggressive acceleration out of the starting gate.  Right into a concrete highway barrier.  The extra shock bumper Mike Harrison had added absorbed most of the hit and limited the damage to mostly cosmetics.  But we flunked the dynamic safety test.  After a mad scramble by the mechanical team (again) the damaged parts were stripped off and the bent parts were secured.  Got back on the track within two hours and passed with room to spare.

While the mechanical team worked their two hour repair race, Scott and Doug convened the software team to analyze the data and descriptions on the event to find the cause.  Within 15 minutes we discovered that the DARPA course files included a space in the name, and our software rejected file names of this type.  We added an underscore to replace the space and the file loaded properly.  To prevent a repeat we modified the checklists to monitor the file load directly.  We’re also resetting more of the modules to assure that there is no parameter or file carryover, even though this should never happen.

It’s now 8pm and the mechanical team is now welding the shock bumper back on the Jeep.

Tonight we’re trying to get a simulation link going between the development systems used for Lidar, Model Maintenance, Path Planning, and Pilot.  This is a real challenge due to the need to create the illusion of movement for the Lidars to work.  The goal is to quickly improve the integration during the time when we are not allowed to practice with the real Jeep.

Tomorrow we will attempt to make our first formal practice and qualification runs.  We will make three of these practice/qualification sets, and we will be judged on the combined score.  We’ll probably plan on a conservative strategy until we get a little experience with the course.  Many of the teams that got onto the 2.2 mile qualification course today had plenty of trouble with it.  The Red Team (last years leader at 7.5 miles) ran over some hay bales and most teams clipped cones and other off course.  The rumors are that 5 of the teams had near perfect runs.  So we really have our work cut out for us.