AUVSI 09 Day 2

It's been a long day for the USNA AUV team we left the hotel for testing at 4:50am and didn't finish until almost 8pm, making for an exhausted, but satified team. The vehicle performed very well today, qualifying in the first seconds after being lowered into the TRANSDEC and proving that it's robust design has great potential for the competition.

Below is a combination of all the pictures that we took of all the other team's vehicles in the AUVSI competition and them working around the pool.

AUVSI Day 1

Today was a long but progressive day. We arrived yesterday evening late after barely making our flight connection in Atlanta.

This morning we expected to have our vehicle at the TRANSDEC facility waiting for us be unfortunately it didn't arrive until 2 hours later. Not being deterred, we at breakfast at the nearest Denny's and to our surprise met a USNA alumni which covertly and graciously paid for our breakfast!

After we picked up our gear, we headed over to a nearby pool for testing where we spent most of the day threshing out any possible bug we could stir up.

During the testing Captain Nicholson and Sayre took a trip to the Tecnadyne company, who refurbished two of our thrusters, where we got a tour of the literally "in house" workshop where our thrusters were built.

To finish the long day we ate a satifying dinner at Olive Garden and made plans to leave our hotel at 4:50am tomorrow morning to begin testing again.

(The picture is of the TRANSDEC facility that we will be competing in)

Shipped!

Today we shipped our vehicle. After very promising testing yesterday we are excited about the upcoming competition and our odds against other teams. We were able to use pelican cases for transport this year, giving us peace of mind as to the safety of our vehicle and tools during transport.

San Diego here we come!

Major progress with cameras

After looking through the parts bin, we found a lens that can see objects from a reasonable distance (closer than 6 feet away)! After a day in the pool with the new lens taking some training pictures and some time with the DVT scripting tools, a product has been created that can now recognize the majority of the competition vision tasks. Future testing will be conducted to evaluate the product's ability to recognize objects at varying lighting conditions and distances from objects.

A Productive Week

This week the team was able to do two days of pool testing which helped us to identify a couple of areas in the control code where we could optimize and improve the overall vehicle performance. Our mission devices have all been designed and we are waiting for a few of the last pieces to arrive before we attach them to the vehicle.

The vehicle's cameras are currently being trained to the competition elements that we constructed. (More Pictures of those photo album on the right side)
Here are a few of the pictures from the testing this week.

Returned and Working

The entire team is back now and our team Captain even got married! Here is a picture of him and his new wife at the Wedding and in Barbados during their Honeymoon.

Another week has gone by and progress has been achieved. Numerous hurdles have been overcome including the fixing of the addition to kill switch relay and getting rid of a battery. One of our problems was that it seemed like the vehicle would recieve intermitent commands to the thrusters. this resulted in some serious code searching for probelms. However, it seems the fault lay with a bad battery. Right now the vehicle can maintain a stable depth, reasonable heading control, and waypoint navigation all at the same time. Additionally, we have the dropper board installed inside of the vehicle and ready to be used. It seems our biggest hurdle now will be finding places to put everything onto the vehicle. Maybe we''ll give this turtle some legs. Either way our vehicle is now more capable than the vehicle we had at the end of last years compeition ahcieving an almost .1 m accuracy to waypoints can maintain that point within .3 m. Next week all the troops will be assembled and we shall see how much we can do. The video is of the vehicle sucessfully completing the box test, drive a series of waypoints in the shape of a box below the water while maintinging a depth of 1 foot. The only real issue seems to be a need for better heading control and that without the weight of the cameras the vehicle pitches but those should be resolved before the competion.

Its been a while

I guess we have been slacking when it comes to posting recent developments. That will happen when graduation, comission, final exams, and one team member getting married all occur at the same time. Anyway, currently we have constructed an entire mock up of the course we will be facing in San Deigo so that we will be able to fully test of AUV prior to the compeition. Hopefully this means we can post video prior to the competition to instill fear amongst our foes, but we'll see. The kill switch has also been modified to accomodate the new rules requiring the kill switch to be on and magnet passed over a reed switch to allow the thrusters to power on . The new DVL has been fully integrated into the programing code. We have also finally managed to get the power supply issues to our wireless router completely figured out, freeing us of the infernal Xbee and hyperterminal. For those who don't know what those are, consider yourself lucky. Additionally, we have recieved and calibrated our new compass, a TCM 2.6, and it seems to working fine. Maybe just maybe, we will have a reliable compass but it has yet to be installed. The guy in charge of the forward instrument case is dillydalling in some sunny locale. That is all for now and I will post as more as things occur.

We did implementation testing of our programming buoy today. The buoy will allow us, during testing, to easily modify the AUV's programming with a drag and drop GUI as well as view live video feeds while the vehicle is submerged. We found that the powering of the buoy is ok, although the battery life was shorter then we expected and the wiring of the Ethernet cable through the SEACON connector was mis-wired. We have fixed the wiring but are waiting to charge the existing batteries fully before our next test.

Stable Control Testing

The above video shows pool testing demonstrating stable heading, depth, and pitch control. The photos are a few from the same testing session (More to come)