This evening my brother and I were having non-moving hand stand contests and we would time each other, but then my brother left and I couldn't time myself. I used the Neural Network software to record video of me doing a couple hand-stands, and trained it. It was able to time my handstands from the webcam's image. This is incredible software - it still amazes me that DARPA didn't see its usefulness in the field of autonomous vehicle technology.

Rejected by DARPA. Again.

I made some adjustments to some software and tested. While pushing the Xpeditor down the street it successfully detected and avoided several cars parked along side the road and made it half way around the neighborhood. At that point, accompanied by a flash of lighting and an enormous clap of thunder, it started hailing extremely hard so I had to abort my test. By the time I got back to my garage the street was under water. That's what I get for living in Washington. The neural networks did output some false obstacles and didn't do the best job detecting the real ones, but with only 30 seconds or so of video to train on they did pretty well.

I trained a neural network to avoid cars parked along the side of my road so the Xpeditor will be able to autonomously drive all the way around the 1/3 mile loop. I'll test it tomorrow.

I worked a bit more on the heading-from-video algorithm, did more testing, and worked on the wiring a little.

On the DARPA Grand Challenge Discussion Forum user "mdrumbeat" made a somewhat researched guess on teams that will make it to the NQE. He posts:

I've tallied the following so far:
A) About 14 teams with flawless runs (see seperate thread on site visit results)
B) About 6 teams with ok runs but with a few flaws like hitting cans or going out of bounds once or twice
C) About 15 other teams reporting with failed runs
D) About 5 other teams reporting very bad visits or dropped out

By my best estimate, I am guessing that maybe 5 other teams had flawless runs (bringing that total to 19) and maybe 5 other teams had ok runs (bringing that total to 11). If we assume that DARPA will invite those 30 teams with flawless or ok runs, that leaves roughly 10 teams that had failed visits that could be invited. I would venture to guess that it is the last 10 or so teams that require some time to review and trade off based on technology promise and media worthiness.

This is of course a total guess but that would make the break down something like this:

1) 20 teams invited who had successful visits
2) 10 teams invited who had ok visits but with a few flaws
3) 10 teams invited who had bad visits but have promise in terms of technology or media worthiness

That's my crack at a guess.

If that turns out to be the case I'd say The Prodigies have a pretty good chance of making the cut - our site visit wasn't a complete failure and we certainly show promise in technology as well as media worthiness.

Today is my brother William's 11th birthday. I got my money back for the accelerometer, also.

I tested some more by pushing the Xpeditor down the street, and made some modifications to the software. It's getting there. DARPA will announce semifinalists on Monday (June 6th) instead of today. Today is also my sister Kathleen's 13th birthday. Another thing I did was add some news from Starwars.com about the Discovery show to the news page.