Our run 5 showed lots of improvement, but not enough.  The first gate was perfectly centered.  Down the next straight leg there was no sign of the phantom obstacles from the lidar that had dogged or first two runs.  We clipped the left cone on the next two gates (on the inside of a turn).  Looks like all the problems aren't gone, but it might still be good enough. 

We successfully cleared several more gates, and squarely entered the pair of leading gates to a down hill section.  Heading down the hill quickly (indicating that IRV was centered on the track) and into a right hand turn toward the first set of hay bales.  Over these sections the course transitions from asphalt to grass several times.  Centered on the bales, DARPA paused IRV to wait for a vehicle ahead that had stopped on the course.  It took about 15 minutes, but the restart was clean and we were still tracking close to center as we traversed the narrowing bales, into a section that had only a couple of feet clearance, and into the tunnel.

IRV came out of the tunnel without incident, but our next challenge was a complex gate (a pair of cones entering a left hand turn with a pile of tires centered between the cones and about 10 feet beyond) that would be traversed before we could reacquire GPS. IRV threaded the gate successfully, but the left bias was visible.  There was only about 6 inches clearance to the left hand cone.  We still had some issues but it might still be good enough.

The next gate led to the rental car that we bumped in run two.  By now we were pretty confident that we might pull it off.  Then IRV made a hard right turn and headed off at 90 degrees to the course.  DARPA switched to pause mode, and we requested a 3 minute pause.  Something had gone wrong during the reacquisition of the GPS signals. (see photo below)

When IRV switched to run after 3 minutes, there was an attempt at a left turn back to the course, so the problem looked to be cleared, but our position was too close to the hay bales at the boundary of the course to be able to execute the turn.  Our day was finished and the recovery team headed for the course.