We spent the morning testing the start process for the final event tomorrow. Things started off rough. Just as we were booting the computers on our bot, the generator cut out crashing everything. We scrambled to reboot. DARPA officials quickly showed up at our tent and asked where the heck we were. We managed to get to the start chute a couple of minutes late, but had to wait 2 hours before we did the first launch. The basic idea was that all 11 bots would be ready to go all at once and that they would be released in reasonably rapid succession.

UPenn was the first bot to be released but UPenn was e-stopped in the start zone (nothing they had done, but apparently some e-stop glitch). They restarted and completed a small loop just fine, but the next two bots never got anywhere. DARPA skipped these two bots, and went to MIT who got in the wrong lane on the loop road and could not get back to the start chute without going out much farther (we think they just wanted to go on a mapping mission). Stanford launched next and cut the first turn pretty tight, then immediately veered left coming within 20cm of Cornell and 50cm of our bot before it was e-stopped. It was not at all clear what caused that problem.

In addition to all this drama, it appears the e-stop glitches were numerous on other bots. After a few minutes of consultation, DARPA decided to load only three bots at a time. This process seemed to work a whole lot better (RFI problems???). All the teams launched in rapid succession with the exception of Carolo. We are not sure of the problem, but it could easily be e-stop related.

Well tomorrow is the big day … wish us luck.