I arrived here in Homestead, Florida with my buddy Mark Greene today, and we’re shooing video and writing posts about the most ambitious robotics event ever attempted.

Seventeen teams from around the world are pitting their robots against each other in timed trials at the Homestead Speedway outside of Miami on Friday and Saturday.

We got a briefing tonight from Gill Pratt, the program manger of the Robotics Challenge at DARPA, and then we got a tour of the course on which the robots will be competing. The best part was that we got a chance to talk with some of the teams getting ready for the next two days of competition and saw them putting their bots through their paces one final time before the starting gun fires bright and early tomorrow morning.

Mark has just cut together this video of the night before the main event. Enjoy.