There was excitement right up until the end in Victorville. CMU was scheduled to launch first, but they had some sort of problem with their GPS … which was attributed to the large Jumbotron sitting right next to them. Virginia Tech and Stanford went ahead of CMU, We were scheduled to launch fifth (having finished the qualifying event in fifth place out of eleven we later learned).

While it was a good run, our bot did not complete the 6 hour mission, going off course about 2 hours into the contest. We have since traced the problem to the GPS/INS. This is apparently a problem we have had since the beginning. One out of every 300,000 PS messages appears to be invalid, while the manufacturer's software indicates that it is valid. In this case they produced a NaN (not a number). Turns out this was the same problem that had occurred on course A a few days earlier that we had only partially diagnosed correctly. This NaN went in to the speed controller, which rejected it because of the fix we had implemented previously, but also got in to the steering controller and shut it down (it was not similarly protected). The car just drifted off course and into a driveway almost hitting a house.

By our count we had completed 5 submissions of the 6 we were assigned and were heading to park the car. It appears we were one “if” statement away from completing at least the first mission set of the race. It was a good run, but in the end the teams that were able to test the most won. The two hours we had run here was four times as long as we had ever run before … our second and third longest being course A at 28 minutes and course B for 20 minutes.

A disappointed but proud team is returning to Orlando (and Norfolk) tomorrow.