CajunBot Lab Blog

Today was an interesting day.  I woke up at 8AM after going to bed at 4am because my roommate still has his cell phone alarm set.  The room wasn’t cold but I was freezing.  For the next 2 hours I lay in the bed, covers over my head and too cold to get up and turn the heater on.  I thought “I know this feeling.  I’m sick”.  I guess its the change of weather messing with me, but all day I’ve had a fever and have been feeling just generally bad.  The 4 hours of sleep probably didn’t help either.  But Team Cajunbot is versatile, and so we made a list at lunch of what tasks had to be done and my teammates each took a task and worked on it.  Drilling, running wires, messing with the computers – they stepped up and did jobs they don’t usually do so I could get some rest.   It’s about 11:30 in California now, and we have 2 radar mounts finished (Dallas and Big John), the bottom laser sensor back on the bot and calibrated (Little John, Amit and Chris), and the disk from the computer backed up and replaced (Mark).  Thanks to everyone who pitched in today and did my many jobs.  Hopefully I will get a good night’s sleep tonight and be back to my multitasking self tomorrow.  I have some pictures of our day to day work that I want to put in the picture gallery, but I haven’t had time to do that yet.  Hopefully I will be able to do this tomorrow so you all can see what we are getting done here.  By the way, it has occurred to me that it takes an entire team and a sick me to do my job.  You know what – I’m feeling better already Joshua.

VICTORVILLE, CA – If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve learned about the forest fires, Santa Ana winds, and closed highways. You may be wondering if we are safe.From our hotel we can see the huge bellows of smoke, flowing from the north to the south along the mountains, we can also see the fire itself, yet we are not in the area (currently) threatened by the winds and the fire. The wind is so strong that it has toppled several big-rig trucks. One can only imagine what it may do with cars, may be turn them into projectiles.

Though we are not in the line of fire (literally and figuratively), we are affected. Earlier today we had planned to send Danny to Irvine to pick up a radar from Team Cyberrider. But Danny had to turn around very soon after getting on the highway; the highway was closed. Thanks to the highway closure I have also had to re-route Amit Puntambekar via Las Vegas , instead of Ontario, CA. Amit, who now works for Vmware in the valley, was scheduled to fly through Ontario. We cannot get to the airport due to the natural disaster. But he has been adamant that he needs to get to work. So we had to change his itinerary.

Other than limiting our ability to go West to Los Angeles region, Santa Ana winds are not really affecting us much.

- Arun Lakhotia

^{Hello Team Cajunbot fans. This is Joshua coming to you through the interwebs from sunny California. We arrived in California yesterday and, after refusing to order cajun shrimp at a TGI Friday’s in California, hit the road and drove about 45 minutes to Hesperia. I knew we were staying at a Days Inn here, but I wasn’t really worried about it. As long as I have a bed I’m happy right. That was before I got here. The place isn’t so bad, except for being in a seedy area. There is a Circle K on the one side with customers throwing up gang signs and scaring the clerk (seriously). Oh and did I mention last night a police helicopter flew over our parking light shining a spotlight like they were looking for an escaped criminal. But no worries. I’ve lived on the hard streets of Lafayette for a few years so I can handle it. True to Cajunbot form, we were up until 3am this morning (5am Lafayette time – I hate jetlag) calibrating sensors and making sure the bot was in working order. Since Chandan and I were up late (or early I guess) getting the bot ready to go, I got to wake up at the crack of 11:30 while the other team members were running Raginbot and doing silly things like eating breakfast and lunch. I prefer to sleep through both, but I have a feeling that will be the last time I’ll get to sleep like that until I get back home. We’re not sure where we are going to test the bot yet, but we might go visit slashx, the area of the first Grand Challenge, and test there for a while. We have a lot do do still, and only a few days to do it. Wish us luck, because we’re not going to sleep until Raginbot is ready to go.}

Oh yeah, I’m going to try to post a new blog every day about what is going on with the team, so stay tuned for updates, and thanks for all your support!
Joshua.

(with edits by Doc A using Disney style guide)

VICTORVILLE, CA – Well, I was up late last night capturing the excitement. I was saving the writeup as I went along. Finally, I added some pictures and saved, and what came back was a blank page. All my creative writing was gone in the blackhole of cyber space.

So here I go again…

A few days ago I exchanged note with a fan who used the phrase — change is the only constant. Its one I have heard before, but for some reason it stuck in my mind. I thought it was too cliched, and had to respond with some thing else. So I came up with another tautology — some things stay constant through change.

That’s what I was experiencing last night. A new bot, all new sensors, a new challenge, a different (not new) hotel. But one thing stayed constant through all the changes. Joshua waa out in the parking lot cutting and grinding metal. We were there before in the first challenge, except there were a lot more hands besides Joshua. The first version of the ME team, big man Jonathan Raush using his hands as vice and Patrick doing the cutting and welding. We were there the second time with Adrian, Joshua, and Murali making sensor mounts in a church parking lot. And here we are again, Joshua breaking the quiet of the night with the machine tools, helped by John Herpin.

So why this last minute metal work.

We currently have one very significant weakness. CajunBot-II (henceforth, I’d refer to as CajunBot) cannot see very far to the left and right. This particularly happens when the road has a hump, such as to drain water. The vehcile has a slight ‘roll’, which makes its lidar beam shoot over a vehicle over 30 meter to the left and shoot on the ground 30m to the right. Which means CajunBot cannot see any vehicle beyond 30m to the left and right. This is very, very limiting when she is trying to merge into traffic. It takes the vehicle about 8 seconds to complete a turn. If the traffic is flowing at 20 mile/hour (about 10 meter/sec), it would take 3 seconds for a vehicle (with right of way) to plough into CajunBot.

Why are the sensors so limited? Well, we finally found out yesterday that is a feature of the sensor, not a bug. We are using Ibeo ALASCA Scanner.  We have been having trouble with the sensors seeing objects at 150m sometime, and just about 30m other times. We’ve been stumped. Their sales engineers narrowed down the issue — “The sensors are faulty.” Which is a very unsual and candid statement from a “sales” person. That’s probably why he is also called an “engineer.”  The company was extremely kind and sent us two new sensors, which we received the day CajunBot was leaving for Victorville. Our hopes of fixing the problems were squashed once we tested the vehicle with the new sensors. We just did not find any improvement.

But there is a silver lining there. We now have two more Ibeo scanners. Which is like Christmas coming early since their price tag is about 1/4th of my entire budget.  Mark McKelvy, John Herpin, and Joshua figured out how they can put ‘our’ (until we return them) sensors to good use.

Joshua was busy cutting metal to build mounts for ‘our’ additional sensors.

– Arun Lakhotia

VICTORVILLE, CA – Time and again strangers have rushed to our rescue some very expensive property, just on the basis on the phone call. Last year it was “2 the Max ATV” (Gina — we remember you), who had sent a brand new Max IV ATV to use as spare. The project itself was started by the generosity of Brother Ray Majors, at that time a stranger. He sent his ATV after just 15 minutes on the phone.This time we have previous Grand Challenge competitors sending us their Eaton Vorad Radar’s.

Last night once John H, Mark, and Dallas finally diagnosed why Ibeo Scanners were not seeing as far in certain situations. The short version of the diagnosis — there is a significant blind spot in our current sensor configuration. The solution — fill the blind spot using additional sensors.

We are now running two strategies in parallel. The first one, as mentioned earlier, is to use ‘our’ (until we return them) new Ibeo Scanners. We can use the extra scanners to cover area left blind by the ones we have.

The second strategy, the subject of this note, is to use additional radars. We currently have two Eaton Vorad EVT-300 Radars. We bought three of these units for the first challenge. At that time they ended up being used like jewelry on the bot, they were not even power on. Three weeks ago, when we were having trouble with the Ibeo Scanners, we installed two of these units on the bot, one on each side of the vehicle’s hood. Suresh G, our lead software engineer, finally finished integrating the radars with the rest of the system on the 45 minutes flight from Lafayette to Houston. The integrated system was tested on Sunday and found to be very good, so long as the radars could see other vehicles on the road.

The good thing about these radars is that their range — almost 150 meters. The bad thing is their field of view  (FOV) — about 12 degrees. This FOV is sufficient to see along a lane if the radar is centered on the lane. But we want to use the radars at intersections, before the vehicle turns into a lane. This reduces the effective FOV.

Our second solution is to install two radars on each side of the hood. The 24 degrees FOV, and crossed fingers, would cover the blind spot well enough.

There is one catch though. Eaton Vorad does not manufacture these units any more. About a month ago when I started my contingency purchases, I had coincidentally received a note from a researcher in Singapore asking if I could spare my VBOX (the electronic box that goes with the radar). It was not much of an issue at that time because our plans to use the radars were not firm. However, with the radars taking center stage now I had a big problem — we have only three units. The company does not make any more of these. Where do I get the fourth from?

Google came to rescue. It turns out the only people who have publicly stated that they use Eaton Vorad Radars are four teams from 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. The other three are Team AION, Team Cyberrider, and Team Overbot.

After half hour on Google I had the phone numbers of two teams. Twenty minutes later I had commitment from Ivar Schoenmeyr of Team Cyberrider and John Nagle of Team Overbot to loan their radars. No official letter, not even a hand shake, just a simple “hello, please, and thank you” later I have two radar units on their way to the hotel by Fedex.

Isn’t that amazing. These radars, mind you are not inexpensive. Besides now that they are out of production, they become more valuable for people who need them. They work really well for what they do. And these two guys are sending it to a stranger. Well, its likely we met during the past challenges, but we were too busy to remember the encounters. So really we are strangers for all practical purposes.

My guess is that the reason each of the person I have mentioned above stepped up to help a stranger (my team) is because of the magnitude of the endeavor we have undertaken. Great life lesson, albeit pretty late in the career.

- Arun Lakhotia