Stone bowl bip bim bop – in a lunch bag

There's a lot to like about bip bim bop made in a stone bowl, beyond the freshly steamed vegetables and the warmth that keeps on coming even 15 or 20 minutes into the meal. The best part, Pam would say, is the crisp browned edges of the rice where it spent just the right amount of time against the hot stone. In her creation tonight, she left the bowl on the burner long enough to char the rice until it was black and smoky.

Here's the twist. Bip bim bop is great for leftovers, layered into a plastic container to make an attractive presentation like a Japanese bento box. But it is just microwaved, not quite the same as stone bowled. This time Pam had some of the charred rice left over, so that's what went first into her leftovers. Tomorrow when she warms it up, she'll get the smoky goodness of the stone without having to lug the three-pound bowl to work with her.

A difficult afternoon, but victory is ours

It was an excruciating afternoon on the IGVC proving grounds as the University of Detroit team wrestled with multiple failures on the machine. µCERATOPS went into the afternoon holding first place in the navigation and autonomous challenges, and had the potential to lengthen its leads. Instead, everything went wrong.

After checking out the computers to figure out what went wrong on the midday autonomous run, the team went back to the line with a different computer in the top slot of the machine, and once more it was unable to move forward because of an apparent failure on the USB bus. They retreated to the main tent where the machine was stripped down by about six people who had their hands on the vehicle and three or four more running for the spare USB hub, cables and other odds and ends. Pam and I were pretty much overwhelmed by this point -- the tension was high, let's put it that way -- so we buried ourselves in our computers nearby while the team scurried around, remarkably calm considering the situation.

They ended up with a machine running on three computers, not just two, and went back for more runs. This time the machine ran well through the first part of the course but then got mixed up in one of the switchbacks and began retracing its steps back to the starting line. For another team it might have been an okay run, but for the leaders, it was a disappointment.

Meanwhile other teams were tweaking their vehicles and making decent runs. University of Michigan Dearborn made it just far enough to squeak past the UDM distance, taking first place for a while. Then Bluefield State College took the field, made the switchbacks, made the two ramps and kept on going, all the way around to the finish, the only team to do so. Everyone watching, competitors included, gave them a big round of applause. Later, Lawrence Tech made it most of the way around before timing out at five minutes. The judges let them keep going to see if they would have made the finish and they did so. This put µCERATOPS in fourth in the autonomous challenge.

There was some pressure on the navigation challenge, too, but no vehicle could master the tricky fence with the moving gate, so the UDM team held onto first. Everyone on the team was working the numbers in their head, trying to figure out if any other team had performed consistently in all three categories: design, navigation and autonomous.

No one had. When the scores were tallied and the awards announced, it was the University of Detroit Mercy that took home the biggest trophy, for first place overall. There was plenty of jubilation among the very tired team members, but all of it was mixed with second-guessing about what went wrong, what could have been done better, and what the hell had happened within the computers. But all that didn't really matter. There was only one winner, and that was UDM.

Midday update: Doing well, but glitches remain

Good news on the Autonomous Challenge as the UDM vehicle is in first place after the morning heat. Under bright sunlight and glare, none of the vehicles is doing well and none has made it over the first ramp. But there are two more "heats" so UDM's position is not secure.

On the navigation challenge, UDM is in second, right behind Hosei University from Japan. They both got through seven checkpoints before hitting the edge of a fence.

Now the bad news. For the first run of the second heat in Autonomous, µCERATOPS was at the starting block when the vision system stopped working. Kevin and the team worked frantically to restart the main computer while pulling out the backup laptop. Fingers flying on the keyboard, laptops sliding in and out on their tracks, grim looks on everyone's face. Once called, you have a minute to get on the field and a minute to start your vehicle. They timed out. Ouch.

The team retreated to their field tent to check out the system. Meanwhile, to make things more nerve-wracking, the generator stopped working, and the vehicle needed to be charged. Someone ran for the backup generator, got it out of the trailer, and fired it up.

Dr. Paulik: "Is it working now?"

Kevin: "Yes, but I don't like this."

Dr. Paulik: "Remember, we were plugging and unplugging a lot of things. IO (input-output) can be tricky."

Kevin: "I don't like it."

They'll be running another heat soon. Hoping for the best.

Robots all over the place

Pam and I spent the last two days hanging around in a field with about 250 engineering students and their robots. Or sitting in a 100-meter-long tent filled with students and their work tables covered in laptops, cordless drills, half-eaten plates of food, broken components, soldering rigs, wheels and tangles of wires. The scene is surreal.

Out on the practice course for the 16th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC), groups of students walk behind small wheeled vehicles that are jerking along, bumping into barriers, twirling around in circles and occasionally breaking into full-speed straight-ahead mode that has the students trotting to keep up.

Not all the vehicles are moving. Some students are hunched over their 'bot peering at one or more laptops, fingers on the keyboard to muscle the code that drives the GPS, ladar (laser-radar), movie cameras, laptop computers, charging systems and drive systems.

Inside the tent, vehicles are up on blocks with their wheels spinning, or tipped over, or partially disassembled because something isn't working. Some run on tank-like tracks, some have three wheels, some tow trailers with little gas generators on them. They range from crude angle-iron construction to sleek shaped bodies, squat to tall, but they all have masts that run about four feet tall, for the cameras, and small units on the front that look like drip-coffee makers but actually are $5,000 ladar units with a funny brand name: SICK.

Kevin's team is fielding a fine-looking machine called µCERATOPS (that's micro-ceratops, named after the dinosaur). It's a big improvement from last year's Capacitops, a three-wheeler that placed third place overall. The new machine has four wheels and an articulated body like one of those buses that bends. It can turn on a dime, which comes in handy when it noses up to a barrier and needs to turn sideways to get around it.

Kevin and his team (eight students and three faculty) made the semifinals in the design competition and after their second presentation to the judges this afternoon took third place in design. I was a bit disappointed because the vehicle from the winning team (Princeton University) has a plastic-paneled body held together with duct tape. Definitely not elegant, but Dr. Paulik says their presentation was superb.

It doesn't matter, though, because I'm told that the Princeton robot doesn't actually know how to drive the course. And I've seen with my own eyes that µCERATOPS is one of the strongest vehicles in the competition.

So when they all take the field tomorrow for three sets of runs in navigation and autonomous operation, the odds are good that µCERATOPS, from the University of Detroit, will take home some high honors. Stay tuned.