Qualified are:

Victor Tango
CarOLO
Ben Franklin Racing Team
Team Cornell
Stanford Racing Team
Tartan Racing
MIT
Team UCF
Team AnnieWay
Intelligent Vehicle Systems
Team Oshkosh Truck

There are lots of journalists around, but now you can finally find some stuff in the news. The German news magazine Der Spiegel published a fairly neat article about the Urban Challenge with some shots of our video we produced some weeks ago. TG Daily has some very interesting movies about our Tech Talk at the George Air Force Base in Victorville, which are definitely worth to watch.

More videos of the NQE can be found on our Stanford Racing Team website or on YouTube.

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Today we had to repeat one test on which we’ve been a little bit slow. After changing some parameters we were much faster, but also very aggressive and sometimes dangerous for other cars. So we had to do some changes again and for the second retry Junior behaved perfect and we got the “good to go” from DARPA for the final race on Saturday.

Unfortunately my laptop died today. Maybe because of the dusty air and the sand all around here. Need to get a new one soon.

Junior performed on the NQE course A (left turns and merging) flawlessly. Actually he’s the only one who could complete course A without any errors. Well, Tartan Racing (CMU) was much faster, but they made some mistakes and almost caused some accidents. One more qualification test to pass tomorrow, but so far we’re very confident for the race on next Saturday.

Yes, we were the only team that finished NQE course C (intersection and u-turn) today and also the only team that didn’t break any traffic rules on this course. Go Junior, go!

However, other teams like Oshkosh had serious problems with their truck on the narrow streets of NQE course A and the Porsche Cayenne of Sting Racing ran directly into a concrete wall. Unfortunately the engine of the VW Passat of the German Team-Lux turned of suddenly on course B. I’ll hope they get a second chance from DARPA to redo this test in the following days.

Today we’ve been almost kicked out of the race. We had some serious problems at the DARPA e-kill test. Junior didn’t want to move any more. In the last minute we figured out that a microcontroller got stuck and reset it manually. Junior finally started to drive and completed his task successfully. Tomorrow we’ll try to rebuild the situation and do some code review.

For the Germans two articles:

• Urban Challenge: Stelldichein der Elite-Unis (heise online)
• Das Auto muss lernen (Technology Review)

Today we arrived in Victorville, a city in the desert north-east of LA, which is the venue for the Urban Challenge 2007.

For the first days it’s supposed to be just the setting up of our pit area and some more testing and bug fixing. But since Stanford/VW ERL won with Stanley the last DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 we already have a lot of media attraction. Cameras and people jumping around, filming us at work and asking questions; mainly technical, but also about expectations and confidence. It’s amazing to see all the other cars and very interesting to talk to the people, who created them. Some of the teams built up a car out of a bunch of junk while other teams got millions from their sponsors to develop their sophisticated cars. I’ll keep you updated and gonna take some more pictures of the other teams in the next days.

Took the Friday off and went to Yosemite again, for rock climbing of course.

Gallery: Yosemite National Park (49 pictures)

Gallery: Yosemite National Park (49 pictures)