Two months left!

Hello world! It’s been nearly two months since we’ve updated you on our progress. Things have been crazy here at Nova. We’ve recently migrated our entire simulation environment to CARLA. We took part in UTD’s Homecoming Parade with no one in our driver’s seat (see Dylan’s video). Our brake pedal’s linear actuator suddenly broke, so we’ve had to revamp our pdeal actuation. On and on, everyone on the team is involved in something new, interesting, and challenging. Really challenging.

To add to all this, we’ve recently crossed the two month mark: Less than two months until Demo 2 has to be wrapped up, recorded, and in the books. Making Demo 2 work is like making a ball out of rubber bands. Anyone who’s tried this will understand that the bands will bend and sag and snap, and you’re dealing with the bending and sagging and snapping of all the bands at once, and they’re twisting and slipping until, all of a sudden, you have a neat, colorful ball in your hands.

This is just to say that the ball is being made. All of our components, from semantic segmentation to PWM interfaces to map routing, are steadily, twistingly coming together. And in two months the ball will be formed.

If you’d like to spy on us, you can track our code’s evoluton in real-time on our GitHub. If you see us testing on campus soon, be sure to wave hello. And be ready to jump out of the way!

Josh, our software architect, takes shotgun while Kyle (right) walks alongside during the Homecoming Parade. No driver!