Video from 2010

Check out this youtube video of our run that won us 2nd Place overall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDqCgpJi2o

All Packed up and Shipping out

We have packed up the AUV and sent it out to San Diego. We'll be able to put it back to working order by noon Tuesday.

Great Finish to a Bad Week

Last Friday we managed to fry all four of our thrusters and we have no idea how it happened.  We came in Friday morning after I-Day for the class of 2014, we planed to take the vehicle to the pool that morning so we tried to conduct a brief test in the lab before heading to the pool.  Upon discovering that some of the thrusters where not working properly, so we began trouble shooting.  In the process of trouble shooting we managed to create a large spark.  We have no idea how it happened but for the rest of Friday and all of Tuesday we tried to find what caused the problem.  By the end of the day we found that we had damaged the D2A board and after replacing that everything work fine.  We have had to replace all of the thrusters, find a leak, and fix the leak. Today we have managed to tweak our heading control and conduct waypoint driving all without our camera box because it is currently in the machine shop or our vertical thrusters (we only had 3 spare thrusters).

Tomorrow we start packing in order to have the vehicle and everything we need in San Diego when we show up so we can hit the ground running in San Diego.

5ft Depth Test

6.29.2010 Pool Tests

Today was the first day the entire team took the AUV down to conduct some tests in the pool. We took the AUV to the diving well in Lejeune Hall to tweak the gains on the controllers. You can see from the graph that the initial gains caused the vehicle to be unstable, but for the second test we changed the gains and it worked well even with a disturbance. We also worked on the heading and pitch controllers.  Although they aren't quite where we want them for competition, we have been able to make significant improvements.  Today was very productive but we won't work much for the next two days because we have been loaned out to help with I-Day here at the Academy.  Come friday and next week we will be in full swing.

USNA AUV Team 2010

USNA is getting ready for the 2010 AUVSI.  We've got only 4 team members this year and our project adviser is still CAPT Jack. Team Captain is 2ndLT Joseph Jennett, with 2ndLT Kevin Fleischer working with the cameras.  ENS Harry Davis and MIDN 1/C Paul Schouppner are working on the programs.  So far this year we have changed out the DVL, redesigned the power supply, rewritten the code, and created some new circuit boards that replace two old circuit boards.  We also had to fix the tail of the frame that held the aft thruster on after it broke earlier this year.

 

Starting next week, for the first time this summer, the entire team will be here working on the vehicle at the same time.  We've all got different schedules and other things we have to do, but for the next couple of week everything will be about winning the 2010 AUVSI....

After the Competition

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)

Pool Testing

More footage from testing last Friday.

Depth and Pitch Test

The team successfully completed a stable depth and pitch test of the AUV. After tweaking the integral and derivative terms in our PID depth controller we were able to eliminate any oscillation and achieve a very acceptable settling time. The depth cell which was used for this test has a slight bias that caused a small amount of depth error but this problem will be rectified shortly when the new cell is installed.

Thruster Testing