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.