The challenge of the Autonomous Vehicle Competition, hosted by hobbyist electronics vendor SparkFun at its Boulder, Colorado, headquarters, seems simple enough: Build a robot that can navigate itself around the company's parking lot. Though the AVC course is dotted with small obstacles, it's really just one lap — a distance of less than 900 feet. But for the majority of competitors, it feels more like the path into Mordor.

Flashback to last weekend, in the thick of this year's competition. The phrase: "I just hope I make it around the first corner" fills the air under the Pits Tent, where long tables are cluttered with skeletal RC cars, thickets of loose wire, boxes of circuit boards and spare parts; the detritus of a mad roboticist's laboratory. Clustered around them are students, engineers, and hobbyists of all ages making the frantic last-minute adjustments that they hope will give their bot the speed and smarts to run the course under its own guidance.

"I just hope I make it around the first corner."

"In seven years, it's gotten really, really advanced," says Nathan Seidle, who founded SparkFun in his college dorm room and created the AVC to settle a friendly debate among his employees about the best strategy for making self-guided vehicles. "The very first years, it was pretty spectacular when a robot made the first corner," he says.

This year, half of the 71 teams entering the AVC will clear that first bend. But only a handful of bots will make it all the way around the course — dodging barrels, jumping ramps, and possibly tangling with The Discombobulator, an eight-foot plywood platform that spins at 50 RPM and guards a coveted shortcut.