Mods for robotic VX

[Swordy]

So wheres the pics Bubba?!?!

[Tone]

Wonder what ever happened to this? Have never even been contacted and I live in the same small town. I like it much better when people DO something first and THEN talk about it. Any pics on their website seem to be protected from viewing and no address is listed for them.

[kobie]

Looking at their website, they've been busy... and they've been invited to the first dance. Congrats! Following is a paste from their website:

DARPA invites Austin Robot Technology to NQE
August 23, 2005
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced today that Austin Robot Technology has been invited to the Grand Challenge 2005 National Qualification Event (NQE) to be held September 28 to October 6, 2005 at the California Speedway, Fontana, California. The two other alternate teams invited by DARPA to the NQE include Princeton University and Team Underdawg from San Jose, California.
Forty-three teams are now invited to compete at the NQE, 20 of which will advance from the NQE to the final Grand Challenge Event on October 8.

Perceptive readers will note a time lag between this entry and the previous entry on this page. "--Rest assured that means we have been hard at work on our robot, if not our website," quipped Austin Robot Technology's team leader :-) "--We have lots of photos of our vehicle and other content we want to publish on our website. We'll start working on it October 9th."
...
and a quote from their website:
"Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it." -- Chinese Proverb

[tomdietrying]

Kobie,
I'd like to check it out. What is their website?
Peace.
Tom

[Jorge]

I'd like to check it out. What is their website?

Hello Tom,

I got your email via our website today :-) Thanks for the personal email!

Jorge

[Jorge]

Looking at their website, they've been busy... and they've been invited to the first dance. Congrats!

Hello Kobie,

As you can imagine, it's been an unbelievable amount of hard work! Thanks for the good wishes! Tom sent me an email which prompted me to log back into y'alls website (vehicross.info). I guess I haven't been active enough at vehicross.info to call it "our" website yet ;-) Sorry I haven't been more active...

Jorge

[Jorge]

Wonder what ever happened to this? Have never even been contacted and I live in the same small town.

Hello Tone,

I replied to your earlier post (last May) and invited you to send us an email if you wanted to come check out our robot. Sorry if you didn't see the post:

http://www.vehicross.info/forums/sho...99&postcount=6

In case the above link does not work, it was post #6 on the following topic "Heavy duty brush guard for VX". The invitation still holds... Send us an email if you would like to come check it out, but we are now in super, SUPER crunch time... three weeks before our robot needs to compete head-to-head with Carnegie Mellon's $3,000,000 robot, and against Stanford, Caltech, Cornell, and others... whew! Piece-o-cake ;-)

Thanks,

Jorge

[transio]

I like it much better when people DO something first and THEN talk about it.

You mean like going to war with Iraq? You're right, talking about stuff first is a waste of time. We should just act on instincts like animals.

[Jorge]

So wheres the pics Bubba?!?!

Hello Swordy,

Sorry I haven't been keeping up to date with the vehicross.info forum...

I have hundreds of pictures, most of which I haven't even uploaded to our own website... No time :-( After the race is over I promise to figure out how to upload pictures into vehicross.info and I promise to upload more pictures than you can wave a stick at :-)

In the meantime, and by way of making amends :-) here is a web page that has some pics of the robot, and *even more exciting* it has some pics of our first site visit in May where you can see our robot driving around the obstacles set by DARPA representatives (plastic trashcans :-) I created this page for Col. Starr of the Texas National Guard at Camp Mabry in Austin when we were trying to obtain permission for using Camp Mabry for our 2nd site visit:

http://www.austinrobot.com/misc/dsv_summary/

Since then we have added laser rangefinders and cameras to the rooftop mount. The robotic VX is quite a headturner :-)

Thanks,

Jorge