I’ve been strangely absent from blogging recently, with only one highly cynical post in the last few months.

Well, it’s all for a good reason.

I’ve been putting in some “free” hours at work (and at home) on a new project. For once in the last year and a half, fun and work are not mutually exclusive. I’ve been working on a DARPA “Challenge” with a few other companies. The goal is to build an autonomous robot that can navigate though a city, avoid hitting cars, light poles, pedestrians, pot holes, etc… and do it as quickly as possible.

I can’t talk much about it, or anything else I do at work, but it’s teaching me a heck of a lot more about engineering that my current position. I get to play with LADAR units, play with MATLAB, design programs to interface with hardware, and watch a robot be built. All in all, things like this keep a engineer happy.

I was browsing Wired’s site, as I do every so often and came across an interesting article about how robotics and programs like the DARPA Grand Challenge are starting to have an effect on the automotive industry and the way people drive.

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