8:36AM All 11 vehicles have been launched. CMU and TerraMax already had a very near miss on a head-on collision as CMU was riding the center line in the road. The camera quickly switched to another view, but both vehicles are still running fine, so the hit was avoided.

8:38AM We are being told that Team Ben Franklin has broken down and is being moved off the road. Team Ben Franklin has not been officially retired yet.

8:45AM Ben Franklin is on the move again.

8:58AM CarOLO is off the road and stuck in the dirt in an off-road section of the course.

9:09AM CarOLO is being dug out of the pile of dirt he is stuck in.

9:11AM UCF and IVS came up to an intersection and both stopped. Cornell came up behind UCF and decided to pass UCF's chase vehicle and so it was left of center. IVS made its turn and was coming along the other lane and deftly avoided Cornell. Cornell moved completely into the left lane and is waiting for IVS to clear the intersection. Ben Franklin also made the same turn passed Cornell (who is still in the left lane) using in-lane obstacle avoidance, by moving to the left! We have a huge robot traffic jam. UCF is still stuck at the stop sign and Cornell has been paused.

9:21AM UCF has finally cleared the intersection. Cornell has recognized this and moved back into his lane behind UCF and cleared the intersection. This event was really costly for Cornell as they were waiting on an effectively disabled vehicle for about 10 minutes.

9:26AM IVS is stuck at an intersection. Little Ben, two chase vehicles, and Virginia Tech are all queued up behind IVS. It's a one-way street so the vehicles won't replan. We are in all-pause now.

9:31AM TerraMax has been passed before taking out a structural pillar in a building on the side of the road near Area "A." So much for the "safest vehicle in the competition!" We'll have to see if they let TerraMax restart.

9:35AM Oshkosh, Annie Way and IVS are being removed from the course. Team Case is all sitting here watching the action and we can't help but think that DEXTER could be competing well against these machines.

9:42AM It looks like Little Ben is trying to pass into Knight Rider. They are within about 5 inches of a collision. Maybe Little Ben tried to pass a chase vehicle. The chase cars are following far enough behind the robots that some cars might try to pass them and pass in ahead of the chase cars. We are in all pause. Oshkosh, Annie Way, and IVS are out.

10:00AM We are back under way.

10:10AM MIT is having a lot of trouble on the off-road section. They are inching forward and backward and passing phantom obstacles.

10:14AM VT is the first team to complete mission 1 of 3.

10:16AM UCF is in a house!! Looks like they are done. Stanford is finishing mission 1 right now.

10:21AM VT is back on the course for mission 2. MIT and CarOLO are stopped nose-to-nose. No contact is apparent, but both vehicles have stopped. It looks like CarOLO cut off MIT in a left turn in an intersection.

10:24AM Stanford is back under way for mission 2.

10:38AM UCF's Knight Rider is out of the race. UCF has a '96 Subaru Outback and only 10 team members, so congrats UCF on their performance to date!

10:48AM Little Ben is the 3rd machine to finish mission 1.

10:54AM CMU's Boss is the 4th to finish mission 1.

10:57AM MIT and CarOLO are getting into trouble again. They are stuck head-to-head in a traffic circle.

11:07AM CMU and Ben Franklin are on mission 2. Cornell has returned from mission 1. CarOLO is now the 5th car out of the race. MIT is the only team that's still in that hasn't finished mission 1 yet.

11:10AM MIT has completed mission 1 and Cornell has relaunched for mission 2. All 6 remaining teams have now completed mission 1.

11:49AM VT is the first team to complete mission 2. VT is looking smooth and confident.

12:00PM VT is on the move again for mission 3!

12:15PM Stanford and CMU are on mission 3. VT looks like it may be having some problems (loss of real-time, perhaps?), but after a brief pause, it's back up and running smoothly.

12:31PM MIT passed Cornell's chase car, and then went to pass Cornell's car. Cornell, who had been stopped for a while, began to move again and MIT then cut off Cornell, smashing into the left front corner of Cornell's machine. MIT and Cornell are currently paused and tangled up. Stanford has been paused because he was entering the zone with the collision. It looks like MIT will be out, and it is unclear if Cornell will be out too.

12:43PM MIT and Cornell are both back up and running. Neither team has been disqualified for the collision.

12:49PM Little Ben has finished mission 2. All but MIT have finished mission 2 now.

1:40PM It looks like the winner is going to be a toss up between Stanford and VT. Both are just about to finish. Likely it will come down to point totals!

1:43PM Stanford has finished the race. They started third overall.

1:44PM Carnegie Mellon has finished the race. They started second overall.

1:50PM VT has finished the race. They started first overall.

Up until now, the course has been guarded 24 hours a day by military personnel to prevent anyone from obtaining prior information about the track. The teams aren't allowed to log GPS, but they can log vision. Some teams rely heavily on vision, so this is a huge boost to some and erodes the benefit of having robust vision algorithms for others. I believe that this is an arbitrary last-minute decision by DARPA that is against the spirit of the competition. I realize that it is important for DARPA to show that the teams they have sponsored can perform well, but I think it's also important to keep the competition transparent and rigorous to not degrade its prestige and credibility.

So, that's the end of the road for Team Case in 2007. It's been a great ride, though! I'll follow up with any additional details later. Thanks all for following us on the blog!

--Farns

On Monday, we replaced DEXTER's batteries. This has greatly improved DEXTER's idling and electrical performance. We also re-ran course A on Monday. We had a problem where the left LIDAR (laser scanner) was tilted too far down and was seeing the road to the front and left of the vehicle as an obstacle. This caused DEXTER to err on the side of caution and not take his turn at the intersections at track A. We've since fixed this issue, and hopefully we'll get another shot at "A."

Another issue that had been giving us trouble is that our vision computer was running on the same 300W 24V DC/DC converter as the LIDAR units, so that power bus was right on the edge of its budget. This situation was exacerbated by our old batteries. So, we decided to mount an additional Vicor 500W 24V DC/DC converter to the vehicle's 48V bus. Unfortunately, during the upgrade, the 24V line came into contact with hot 48V and we lost three LIDAR units - the side two and the rear one. I learned of this around 1AM, so I woke back up and got to work on repairing the system through the night. This involved re-wiring the power connector blocks (which were charred), moving some of our existing and spare LIDARs (the front-left and front-vertical units were moved to left and right, and a spare was mounted at the rear), and updating our sensor placement configuration files to take all this into account.

This morning, the Georgia Tech Sting Racing Team, who has already been eliminated from the competition, graciously lent us two of their LIDAR units. Using these, we were able to re-populate all of our LIDAR mounting locations. CALTECH also let us borrow one of their spare LIDARs. We've ordered new units, but they won't be here until after the NQE is over. So, we are extremely grateful to GT and CAL, who are a class act for helping us out!

As I'm typing, DEXTER is getting ready for his second run of Course B, which is the most similar track to the final competition. I'll post an update later today with DEXTER's results! If you haven't seen it yet, you can also watch DEXTER's first track A run online. Go Team Case!

We did a lot of electrical and sensors work on the robot today, which has kept me and the rest of the bunch on our toes! We noticed that the robot was throttling unexpectedly before the test this morning due to some sort of problem with the real-time computer. A quick decision by Amaury before the test got us through it - he had a hunch that it was not getting enough power from its 12V power supply, so he disconnect its cooling fan which runs on the same supply and ran the robot with the front box open. This got us through the test.

We needed to address this power issue on DEXTER -- fast! Fortunately, Jeff Munier and Jacinda Clemenzi arrived today from ENSCO and were a super great help in getting DEXTER fixed. First, we are now running the cooling fans off DEXTER's alternator-powered 12V line, instead of the 12 V power supply that's powered by the 48V line. Second, we took advantage of the Compact RIO's redundant 12V inputs and we now drive it from both supply lines. Finally, Jacinda discovered a broken 12V connector that was feeding the Compact RIO, so we took care of that as well. These fixes seem to have done the trick!

We also decided today that based on the performance of other vehicles, we should make sure we can detect obstacles that aren't at LIDAR-level. We had previously planned to do this with our Videre stereo camera, which works great at finding objects up to 50 meters away. Of course, this sensor also follows Murphy's Law, so it decided to stop working yesterday. We decided today to bring up the Point Grey Digiclops stereo camera and also mount a LIDAR at a 90-degree tilt to take care of this.

The Digiclops has been on the robot since the 2005 Grand Challenge, but we never used it much because it has a short range of about 15 meters. But thanks to the hard work by Ashwin Deo to get the driver updated this evening, and by Brad Hughes and Christian Miller to get some bugs worked out and integrate the software with DEXLAUNCH tonight, we may have it totally integrated on the robot by tomorrow afternoon's run. We will log data in the morning at the very least.

As for the 90-degree LIDAR, Arkady Polinkovsky did a great job to get the LIDAR mounted on the front of DEXTER, Jacinda and I wired the LIDAR into the Pelican box, and Scott took advantage of our very modular code base to rapidly bring up a new driver for the unit.

I should also pass along great kudos to all the folks running simulations 24/7 on the RNDF's to find any potential pitfalls and to dig up any nasty bugs, and to those working on the maps to make sure DEXTER has the best data possible about his routes before he hits the roads.

In case you aren't familiar, DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Urban Challenge is a competition where autonomous (driver-less) robotic vehicles around the world will race against the clock to complete a 60 mile mission in a city environment in pursuit of a $2 million grand prize.

Today, we set up base camp in and around our rented 2007 Bounder 38' RV. We're proudly displaying our Case School of Engineering, Case Alumni Association, and Jolly Roger flags, and we've definitely got the most unique robot here. Most teams have modified street cars, and are very wary to let anyone too near to their finely tuned machines. Our robot's rugged custom Lothringer off-road racing chassis and lack of a driver's seat, along with our team members' cavalier and easy-going attitudes set us apart from the rest.

Today's activites included setting up simulation stations to predict the robot's behavior on the RNDF (route network definition files) that DARPA has provided to describe the roads and parking spaces at the test site. We also checked DEXTER over mechanically and electrically to make sure he is in tip-top shape.

Tomorrow, we'll put DEXTER through some more aggressive testing in preparation for the NQE, or National Qualifying Exam. Only a maximum of 20 out of 36 teams will pass NQE to go on to the actual competition on November 3. I think we've got a good shot, but there's still a lot of work to do in the week ahead!

View Larger Map

We've made our way to Victorville, CA, home to about 100,000 people, and the well-news-covered California fires. In fact, we can see the fires from our hotel parking lot (!!). Tomorrow's tasks will be to 1) fetch DEXTER from Roadway, 2) get our Route Network Definition File (RNDF) (ie, the map) from DARPA, 3) view the map over satellite pictures 4) set up camp (more on this in the next paragraph) and 5) give DEXTER a new skin.

You should see our RV... wait... in fact, perhaps you can once I figure out how to work this guy.:-)... or not. We have a beautiful 38' mobile command unit (and entertainment suite). Looking forward to driving that around.