Quote Originally Posted by WyrreJ
That's odd. There was a press release a month or two ago from DARPA that listed all of the groups that made the first cut and I specifically looked for these guys and did not find them on the list.
Hello WyrreJ,

NOTE: Wow... this ended up being a longer post than I thought when I started writing it... Sorry for the long post :-)

DARPA originally intended to invite 40 teams to the National Qualification Event (NQE) to be held at the California Speedway September 28 through October 5th. The original cut of 40 teams were selected after the results of the first site visit (DARPA representatives visited more than 100 teams). During our first site visit back in May, our robot successfully avoided the random obstacles (plastic trashcans) placed by DARPA along the test track.

Unfortunately (due to technical glitches and due to the fact that this is an INCREDIBLY hard problem ;-) Our robot did the runs only at idle speed (and DARPA wants a *fast* robot). We therefore did not make the first cut of 40 teams... but DARPA realized there were several really good teams that were left out, so they bent the rules a bit (they are the DoD, and they *make* the rules, so they can bend them if they want :-) Basically DARPA decided to select the top nine teams who did not qualify and award them "alternate" status. The original intent was to use the alternate teams to fill any spots if one of the top 40 teams had to drop out of the race. The ranking of the "alternate" teams would be used to determine which teams would get invited first. Back in June DARPA scheduled a second site visit for all the alternate teams and DARPA announced that they *may* invite the top 3 teams to participate at the NQE depending on the results of the 2nd site vist. Here is a link to the DARPA press release:

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/...nal_July_5.pdf

So for the past 3 months we have been kind of like an NFL Wildcard team :-) I guess it was not too bad making it to the same list a Princeton University ;-)

Two weeks ago DARPA came and visited our robot again, and we were fortunately selected as one of the top 3 teams. As a matter of fact, the top three alternate teams had a strong enough showing that DARPA invited them (us) to the NQE as actual bona-fide semi-finalists:

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/...ss_Release.pdf

We are no longer an alternate team... we will compete on the same footing and on equal ground as the rest of the 40 teams selected in June. So at the end of September you will see our team at the California Speedway, competing against the big boys :-) MY GOSH!!! IS THAT REALLY LESS THAN FOUR WEEKS AWAY?!?!?!

Thanks for the interest... gotta run... I'm trying to figure out the max safe speed for the robot given the radius of curvature of upcoming curves :-)

Jorge