Friday, June 19, 2009

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.

4 comments:

  1. Very impressive, you Navy guys are all about that waypoint control. Have you guys tested that in a non-pool environment or integrated the waypoint control with sensors (ie. not hard code the vehicle path before the mission)?

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  2. I'm unsure what your question is...Do you mean using cameras to navigate or depth control, pitch control etc...?

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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  4. No right now the vehicle is only utilzing its DVL and compass. If you watch the video closely the vehicle has some pitch issues while moving forward and this is due to the forward housing having none of the sensors actually put into it. That is the next step for the vehicle. As for testing it outside of a pool, no, never. That is beyond the scope of what we are trying to achieve in competing in the AUVSI competition. Also the closest body of water is the Chesapeake which I refuse to swim in let alone This hugely expensive project.

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