As you may know, TeamCASE had a site visit from DARPA on Friday, June 22nd, 2007. Our team practiced protocol and professionalism — our robot also practiced the same principals and delivered a top-notch behavior. I was very fortunate to be chosen by my advisor, Dr. Newman, as the day’s E-Stop operator. I got to be very close to the action (in the control vehicle) and got to interface directly with the DARPA officials.
I don’t want to go into too much detail of our site visit — as other teams may still be having site visits. I can say, however, that we demonstrated every required element of the site visit successfully. DEXTER performed basic navigation, U-Turns, static obstacle passing, out of lane obstacle avoidance, intersection precedence, and intersection queuing without any major holdups.
We only had a few hiccups throughout that day that were quickly resolved.
Our officials took a few moments in the conference room to discuss our scores. They invited the entire team in to wrap up the official site visit. Everything sounded VERY promising. The only thing they took points off for, that we know of, was hitting three center lane maker cones.
At one point, our DARPA officials were overheard having discussions that compared our start times to those of Carnegie Mellon University — a top class team. They also commented, “At this rate, we’re going to get to leave early!”
After finishing our site visit almost an hour early, our officials stuck around to get a demo of DEXTER’s advanced behaviors — such as “slam the brakes” when intersection precedence is lost, lead vehicle following, and more intricate intersection situations. Our DARPA officials seemed pleased with their DEXTER experience — after the show-and-tell session, they shook hands with team members and departed.
About 25-30 people were present at the site visit, with 10 of them being our official site visit crew. Others present include team members, our Plain Dealer reporter John Mangels, family, and friends of DEXTER.
There were two mentions of DEXTER in Saturday’s Plain Dealer — and can be found online here.
Another column in the paper describes each of the Track A teams that we are up against, and can be found online here.
Even though our official score is unknown and will probably never be disclosed, we expect it to be high enough to earn an invitation to the NQE (National Qualification Event.) Also check out our team website for videos and photos of our progress.
Southwest United States, here we come!
