Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team car, Boss, has been cleaning up the track here at the DARPA Urban Challenge qualifying events.
Boss completed 26 left turns to successfully merge into oncoming traffic yesterday, and was one of only two cars to complete the navigation and parking trial the day before.
This morning, the robotized Chevy Tahoe easily cleared four-way stops in proper sequence after waiting for DARPA-driven cars to cross first.
The machine did appear to hang up after encountering a railroad barrier across its path. It made half a U-turn, then stopped, apparently unsure whether it had enough room to clear the sides of the road. Its front tires slowly oscillated back and forth in a motion that reminded me of an insect feeling its way with its antennae.
Then, just as a DARPA judge approached team members to ask whether they wanted to try resetting the vehicle to get it moving, Boss turned away from the barrier to complete its U-turn, and drove back the way it had come to find a new route around the blockage.
"Heads would have rolled if it didn't do that," team leader Red
Whittaker told me when I congratulated him. "On a scale of one to 10, that was a four."
Red's in this thing to win. "A machine like this is programmed never to quit," he says. " He and his team have been watching the performance of the other cars at the qualifiers carefully for signs of weakness.
In particular he cites the long nights some of the other teams have been pulling to fix buggy code between trials as a factor that might bring down the competition.
The idea clearly pleases him. "It wouldn't be okay if we didn't come out on top at every event."
