What did I do with the time I wasn’t working before first?
maybe I … wait no that was robotics too… hmm
*Originally posted by PaPPy *
**Anyone else find them self saying this?We shipped our robot yesterday and i found myself saying what do i do now?
**
You can start thinking about the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Basically, you have a year to design a vehicle that can autonomously drive the roughly 250 miles from Barstow, CA (a town in the Desert, just outside of Los Angeles) to Las Vegas, NV in less than ten hours. The course is a mix of paved street, dirt road, dry lake bed, water crossings, and cross country desert terrain. Did I mention that they don’t give you the course waypoints until just two hours before the race starts :ahh:? Oh, and the prize is one million dollars.
I attended the kick-off conference yesterday and found an odd mix of attendees composed of highly starched military brass, professional and amateur robotics geeks, spooky DARPA types, very serious desert off-road racer types, including the CEO of SCORE International, which is the governing body of just about all off-road racing in the world. Oh, yeah, the press was also there. I made the mistake of talking with one of them while they had a tape recorder going :). Looks like the Discovery channel is also gonna do a documentary on this as they had cameras everywhere