With the National Qualification Event (NQE) less than a month away, the team is working extra hard to put the finishing touches on Odin, and make final software adjustments. Once again, team Victor Tango was granted the opportunity to test at the Roanoke Police Department driver training facility. This time, it was Odin's endurance that was the subject of testing. Odin was run continuously for many hours in autonomous mode.
Up until this point, the majority of testing has been targeted at specific software components and functionalities. In theory, if all these individual tests are completed successfully, there should be no problem with running full missions that require several functionalities. However, in reality, this is rarely the case. Odin experienced some bugs that had not been seen before. Whenever a problem was encountered, the team is able to mark a time stamp associated with that error. Later the team can go back and look through all the software's messaging logs and determine the source of the error.
While the this was the first major endurance test on the vehicle, lots of endurance testing has been preformed in the team's 3D simulator. The important difference between the testing in the simulator and testing on the vehicle is the quality of the Odin's perception of the environment. The simulator cannot account for the sensor inaccuracies that are unavoidable with real testing.
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