[At] the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, 
   so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls 
   who know neither victory nor defeat.

                                               Theodore Roosevelt

National Qualifying Event (California Speedway) Results

First Run (September 28). [Video] Golem 2's first speedway attempt was a total failure as it immediately veered off to the right and crashed into one side of a gate meant to simulate a cattle crossing. It knocked down the fence beside the gate and came to a stop. On investigation we found several things that had gone wrong.

1. The robot's start position was forty feet outside the official GPS corridor it was supposed to stay on (unlike last year when the start position was inside the allowed corridor) and we did not handle that properly.
2. A missing decimal point in the calibration of one of our laser sensors caused the sensor to see lots of obstacles that weren't there. This made the robot swerve to the right to avoid the phantom obstacles.
3. The robot saw the real obstacle (the fence) that it was about to hit, and tried to brake. But it reacted a little late and didn't come to a stop until it had already knocked the fence down.
4. After it had knocked the fence down, Golem 2 could have moved on and tried to do better on the rest of the course, but instead it chose to remain at a permanent stop.

Second Run (October 1). [Video] When we fixed the bugs that appeared on the first run, Golem 2's performance improved dramatically. On its second run, it slightly grazed the same fence that it had crashed into before, but after that its performance was perfect. It sped around the high-speed section at 40 miles per hour. It passed through the dreaded tunnel that had caused problems for many other vehicles. It threaded its way around stacks of tires, three parked cars, and a tank trap, and finished the course. By this time every team had attempted the course at least once and Golem 2 finished in the fastest time that had been achieved.

Additional videos follow:

• NQE Run 2, obstacle avoidance : This shows Golem 2 completing the NQE course by avoiding two parked cars and a tank trap.
• NQE Run 2, speeding : This is a video of the "speed" section of the course. Golem 2 was traveling at 40mph, which was the speed limit in that section of the course

Third Run (October 2). [Video]The course was changed around a bit so that there was less asphalt, more grass, and an additional parked van to get around. Golem 2's performance was absolutely flawless. It avoided all obstacles down to the smallest traffic cone and finished in a time faster than Stanford, whose vehicle would eventually win the Grand Challenge. Stanford's Sebastian Thrun commented on our performance, "Wow, from zero to a hundred."

Additional videos follow:

• NQE Run 3, angle 2 : Run 3 from a different camera.
• NQE Run 3, first-person : Run 3 from the perspective of the on-board camera system. Since this camera is mounted front and center on the vehicle, this clip is a first person view of our truck driving itself.
• NQE Run 3, first-person obstacle avoidance : This is a clip showing obstacle avoidance from the first person perspective.

Fourth Run (October 3). Another software bug emerged on the Monday run. As Golem 2 navigated a narrow passage next to a concrete barrier, a glitch in the planned path caused the robot to smack into the barrier and break its steering mechanism. Golem 2 was rushed back to UCLA for a quick repair by the excellent UCLA machine shop.

Fifth Run (October 4). This run was just okay, but it demonstrated that Golem 2 was working again after its accident the day before. The robot did knock over a traffic cone and a stack of tires, but it finished the course in a time that was even faster than the third run.

All the vehicles that ran ahead of us that day had trouble with the final leg of the course, where a tank trap sat in front of the finish line. Tony Tether, the Director of DARPA, bet one of our team members a dollar that the tank trap would scrape Golem 2 as well. "We're not supposed to be betting on the vehicles," said one of the other DARPA officials. "Don't worry about it," said Tony Tether, "We're not betting on the vehicle, we're betting on the tank trap."

Golem 2 sailed smoothly around the tank trap and we collected our dollar. This made us the second-highest money-winning team at the DARPA Grand Challenge.

Grand Challenge Race Results

Golem 2 raced out of the start chute in the seventh pole position. Our plan was to observe DARPA recommended speeds at the start of the race and gradually ramp up our speed from there, until by the end of the race Golem 2 would be driving fifty miles per hour, the maximum allowed speed, whenever it could.

On a paved bridge, Golem 2's laser sensors perceived the reflective Botts dots as obstacles and the vehicle slalomed back and forth between the reflectors. This alarmed the DARPA observers in the chase vehicle, but the robot continued to make good progress.

Once it got back onto the dirt road, Golem 2 straightened out and zoomed ahead at over thirty miles per hour. It went through the 18-mile checkpoint with the fastest time of any vehicle. Our DARPA observers began to believe they were following the winning vehicle.

Golem 2 passed the IVST1 vehicle, which had run into difficulties, and then closed in on the Axion Racing vehicle, which had left the start line twenty minutes ahead of Golem 2. In fact, Golem 2 caught up to the Axion vehicle three times, and was paused three times so that Axion could get ahead to a better passing area. At the time of Golem 2's accident, Axion was just about to be paused so that Golem 2 could pass.

Tragedy struck at mile 22. It turns out that we had overallocated the computer's memory, but this did not become apparent until we had actually used a lot of it to record data. We had never driven such a long and winding course without stopping the program before, so we had never encountered this memory bug. (We were fully aware of the desirability of a hundred-mile endurance test, but with limited time and resources, we never got around to it.) The computer's memory filled up and the program quit.

The vehicle's controls remained fixed at their positions, which happened to be "steering angle 2 degrees left" and "accelerate hard." Golem 2 roared off the course into the desert brush. The DARPA observers hit the pause button but nothing happened, since the vehicle software was no longer running. The DARPA observers had a disable button that would have killed the engine but they chose not to press it. Golem 2 continued to crash through the cactus at sixty miles per hour, flying through the air, leaving devastation in its wake. The tail gate opened, wham, wham, wham, and broke off. Wham, wham, and the tail lights fell off. The battery bounced around in the engine compartment and broke its battery tray. Finally a connector pulled free from the fusebox and the engine died. Golem 2's Grand Challenge attempt was over.

The race driver who drove the DARPA chase vehicle begged us to get him on-board video of the drive through the brush, but unfortunately, we have none. We don't even have laser imaging data, since the computer had stopped working.

All things considered Golem 2 is in fairly good shape, apart from the broken tailgate, tail lights, and battery mount. Our computers and sensors appear to have survived unscathed. It looks as though we chose a good tough platform after all.

Because of our high speed, we were on pace to finish the race significantly ahead of Stanford and the other teams who actually finished. We might have been the fastest team of all (but Team DAD and Team Ensco deserve mention as other teams who drove very fast). It's entirely possible that we would have won the two million dollars with a tiny change in our memory allocation. But that's the way it goes.

(Thanks to Richard Mason, Brian Fulkerson and the Golem Group for most of the text and for the multi-media material)