Friday, September 23, 2005




Sandstorm's nailed its qualifier skills, and now the team's just tightening its bolts, getting ready to ship to Fontana.

H1ghlander's sensors are now all mounted an calibrated. The rest of the day will be spent testing navigation skills with the rebuilt configuration.

For those not working on H1ghlander, it's decal-time.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Two days ago Sandstorm completed an uninterrupted run of race distance, at an average of over 9 meters per second, or about 20 miles per hour. Note the sensor dome looking up the hill in the picture on the left. Unfortunately, Sandstorm's brother overshadowed its great performance with disaster.


I started out the day taking pictures and working on logistics around the routes that the vehicles were traveling on. Both vehicles were running consistently and fast, and the prospects for the day looked great.







The above pictures are of H1ghlander and Sandstorm making some slick turns at about 8 meters per second.


I then took over driving the chase vehicle for H1ghlander, and could barely keep up. The technical term that the team chose to describe H1ghlander's driving that day was "bad ass".


Terrain on the course was difficult. The route was packed with tight turns, sharp boulders, steep slopes and drop offs, mountain sides, deep ruts, etc. The Red Team has always emphasized testing in race conditions, and that day was no different.


H1ghlander completed 140 miles and was driving autonomously back to the entrance road so we could drive it back to the shop to pamper it before the race. We came to a part of the trail where there was a swamp on the left and a boulder-ridden mountain side on the right, with a road width a little bit larger than the vehicle. H1ghlander kicked up some thick dust and I slowed down to a stop to let the dust settle before catching up. The team in the chase car watched our vehicle display which monitors its actions while the dust settled. Problems appeared in the display, and one team member immediately hit the emergency pause button, but it was too late. In the second we lost visual, H1ghlander tracked off to the right of the path up the slope, slid on its side and flipped entirely to the other side.




Damage could have been much, much worse given the severity of the accident. Last night, only 24 hours after the crash, H1ghlander was driving as a regular vehicle again. The whole team is pouring resources into supporting recovery, and to perfecting Sandstorm's performance as much as possible. The mechanical team aims to have the whole system up and ready for sensor calibration by tomorrow. That would give us just enough time to calibrate, test driving stability, and head to qualifiers in California.


Check out Red's race log.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Last night H1ghlander ran 175 miles, averaging 21 miles per hour. The total autonomous miles for the day was up to 250. For the past few days, H1ghlander's computers have been locking up, overwhelmed by heavy computation in the planner. That computation is now bounded, and the vehicle is now capable of running fast and long. The team now has reassurance that winning the race is within reach, and motivation to push on through these last 5 days of intensive testing.

Completing the distance required us to run on into the night. Driving at night is extremely difficult given headlights against thick dust. The robot was completely unphased -- even though it was driving the same speeds as earlier in the day, it seemed like it was going much faster because of the difficult of the driving for us. Here's a shot of the vehicle through the dark and dust:


Evan recently put up a video of Sandstorm driving here. Driving has improved even since that footage was taken.


Some other shots from yesterdays testing:

Tuesday, September 13, 2005



Yesterday both vehicles aimed to drive race distance on a challenging trail, but came up short. Navigation on both vehicles was impressive, but some computing resource and mechanical failures inhibited continuous driving.

The team was disappointed with neither vehicle completing the goal distance, but each drove distances between 60 and 90 miles, in about 30 mile sections -- average speed about 8mps. I have the feeling both vehicles are about to become much more reliable over much longer distances quickly, because the nature of the problems we're facing.






Sunday, September 11, 2005

26 days until the race,and 15 days until the team leaves the testing facilities for qualifiers in LA. There are about 12 guys out here, who are running both H1lander and Sandstorm every day. Today both vehicles will be pushing for top speeds, and tomorrow both vehicles will be pushing for race distance.

I intend to use this blog as an outlet for posting pictures, testing results and hopefully some stories for those interested.