The Princeton IGVC team will be arriving in Rochester, Michigan on Thursday for the 17th annual IGVC. The competition begins tomorrow with the first round of design competitions. We will be making our design presentation on Saturday. Today, our team is enjoying a day at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, before completing the remaining two hours to the competition location. We’ll be updating the blog with plenty of photos and videos as the competition progresses. Check back soon!

We are keeping ourselves quite busy trying to get the robots up and running for the events coming up next month. More information is available on our events page.

March 30: Engineering Open House
P12 will be on display in front of the Friend Center for upcoming engineering students to view.

April 2: Hitting the Big Screen
The PAVE garage and our robots will be filmed as part of video for the upcoming dedication of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

April 4: High School Colloquium
We will be presenting at the Society of Women’s Engineering (SWE) upcoming colloquium, to encourage high school students, especially women, to enter fields of engineering. Our robots will also be on display.

April 17/24: Princeton Preview
We welcome prospective Princeton undergraduate students by displaying our robots and giving tours of our garage. We hope to recruit the incoming student to Princeton Engineering and especially into PAVE

April 24 (1:45 – 3:30): Local Middle School Visit
We will be visiting Mrs. Weinberger’s robotics class at Montgomery Middle school. While there, we will be displaying P12, as part of the middle school students’ unit on the DARPA Grand Challenges. We will also have Arogs displaying its GPS waypoint-following abilities on a course created by the students.

PAVE was at the 2009 NYC FIRST Regional Competition from March 7 to March 8, 2009. This is the second year that we have been invited to exhibit at the competition’s career expo. This gave us a chance to show Prospect 12 and our build-in-progress robot for the 2009 IGVC to hundreds of middle- and high-school students from the greater New York City area. Team photo after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve arrived at the site of the National Qualification Event in Victorville, CA. We look forward to opening ceremonies tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’re unpacking our vehicle, which has arrived safely after being trucked across the country. We’ll be posting updates from our Urban Challenge Blog. Once the NQE gets underway, DARPA will be hosting a webcast from the official DARPA Urban Challenge website.

PAVE is proud to announce that we have been accepted by DARPA to have a site-visit evaluation. The site-visit is the next stage in the multi-step qualification process leading up to the final race on November 3, 2007. Teams that pass the site-visit will move on to the two-part National Qualifying Event (NQE), which will be held in late October, 2007. 52 other teams were also granted site-visits. The official DARPA press release is available here.

The site-visit will take place in mid- to late- June. We will release the actual date once it is confirmed. Our site-visit demonstration will be open to the public. Please contact us if you would be interested in attending.