It was a bit last minute, but I got the option of flying to the Darpa Urban Challenge in Vacaville in Southern California.
It was quite interesting to see those cars driving around by themselves with no one in them, and yet stop at stop signs, yield, pass one another, and everything else. Quite impressive!

the fake city had more than 50 cars pretending to be real traffic






I got to see this contestant being confused about where it was on the course (GPS failure?) and trying to turn in the wrong place until its sensors saw that it was going to hit the center divider, and it stopped. Most other cars had a much better view around them and could see the road layout, even if the GPS signal wasn't working


Stanford's Junior, first to cross the finish line


CMU's caterpillar, which actually won the 2 million dollar price

Carterpillar from Carnegin Mellon ended up winning
and Junior from Stanford finished the circuit first, but ranked second and had to settle for the second price of a mere million dollars :)
The plane ride back was quite interesting as I got the chance to ride in the cockpit and see the takeoff and landing phases.

While it did suck to get up so early to make the flight and spend the day there, it was a quite interesting day and flight. Here are more pictures of the darpa urban challenge .