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.