The SONIA AUV project from the École de technologie supérieure, entirely composed of volunteer, undergraduate engineering students, is devoted to the development of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV).
Since our beginning in 1999, we have developed 7 AUV prototypes with the goal of competing at the AUVSI and ONR's International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. Recent years have seen us consistently ranking in the top 3 positions with our award winning designs.
Journée Porte ouverte de l'ETS 27 Janvier 2013
Saturday July 14, 2012
The finals were yesterday, we are very happy of our performance. We finished in 1st position in front of team Hanse from Lübeck University in Germany and Sauc'isse team from ENSTA in France.
More details will be posted soon. Today, we need to disassemble the vehicle and prepare our boxes for the flight to San Diego tomorrow morning. California, here we come!
Friday July 13, 2012
During the last qualification day, in the morning, we did some updates on our hydrophone system and we tried a new approach of the ASV task. However, we were not able to find the pinger with these updates.
Jacques keeping time
After our first test, we did our presentation for the static judging event. The presentation went very well and we were satisfied with our performance. Half an hour after was our qualifying run. We did the buoy task with the modem communication. The underwater modem communication was working with a 90% success rate. We did not score any points since during qualifications runs, points are only awarded if tasks are completed with a 100% success rate. The missing 10% was due to the unreliable light detection.
François explaining the mission to a judge
During the rest of the day, we worked on improving the buoy task with the underwater modem.
At the end of the day, we finished 4th. The first team did one more task than us and the other two teams did a task that was worth more points than what we did. The team that was under us did only the qualification gate.
Team during the qualification run
For the final, the teams that were only able to complete one task during the qualification runs will only have 30 minutes to complete the final. The other teams have 60 minutes to complete the final.
During the end of the after-noon, we tested the wall obstacle and the results seem good.
Next important events:
Thursday July 12, 2012
Today was the second official qualification day. We arrived early this morning to prepare for this busy day. Our objectives for the day are to do the third task, the buoy, and to link up the first three objectives.
Kevin preparing the submarine for qualification
For the first test of the day, we entered the water at 8:03 in the morning and we started to test the buoy and completed the task successfully. After, we continued our tests with the underwater modem. We were able to send position data to the ASV. However, we did have some minor communication problems. We confirmed that the modem configuration and the software worked well.
Team on boat
During the qualification run, we started with the buoy task alone. On our second try, the submarine succeeded to turn around of the buoy and we sent data to the ASV using the underwater modem. Afterwards, there was enough time on the clock to do a third run. We decided to link up the three first obstacles. The robot succeeded the first and second obstacle and then sadly, the submarine was not able to find the buoy. This will be repaired before tomorrow.
For the rest of the day, we continued work on our hydrophone system. At the end of the day, we did manage to make a late test. We used our sonar to collect data for the wall obstacle.
Waiting for the qualification run
Next important events:
Wednesday July 11, 2012
For the first official qualification day, we were the first team to arrive at the site. We did three successful tests. During the team leader meeting, we learned that there will be no diver with the submarine during the qualifications and final runs. This is a first for us.
For the first official qualification day, we were the first team to arrive at the site. We did three successful tests. During the team leader meeting, we learned that there will be no diver with the submarine during the qualifications and final runs. This is a first for us.
At noon, the competitions organizers confirmed with us the time of our qualification run. We had less than an hour to prepare for the run. We attempted two mission states and decided to chain them. During both runs, the robot did not surface and we lost time looking for the robot due to the poor visibility in the water. Even if we chained both tasks, no points were scored during this qualification run because the submarine did not surface.
Recover of the submarin
After a quick trip to the local store, we purchased some reflectors that we mounted on the submarine. This greatly minimized the time needed to find the robot in the water. Afterwards, we reserved a second qualification time slot that was scheduled for 5 PM.
New look of the submarine
During this second qualification run, we took 10 minutes out of allowed 50 minutes to complete the first two obstacles.
Launch of second qualification
To end the day, we decided to test the underwater modem with the ASV. The organizers tried a new setup on the ASV and we did manage to send some data between both vehicles. We are still looking with them to find a better solution.
Here is the information for the next important events:
Monday July 9, 2012
During our first test of the day, we had an issue with the robot’s front camera. To correct the issue, we needed to open the camera’s enclosure. Luckily, the external CCD captor was not installed correctly in the enclosure. After installing the captor, we tested the enclosure to confirm that it was watertight and we continued with the test. We believe that the problem was caused by the transportation of the vehicle.
Afterwards, we tested the hydrophone system. We are still having problems detecting the competition’s pinger that is located on ASV. We also tested the gate task and the pipeline task. We successfully completed the pipeline task and we had issues with the gate task.
After lunch, we returned to the basin for the second test of the day. We started testing the qualification task. This task consists of leaving the starting point, to navigate towards the pipeline and to pass the first gate. In the basin, we noticed that the vehicle’s DVL had a 2% error on its reported position. We will try to reduce this error with a new solution tomorrow.
We also tested the communication between the AUV and the ASV with the acoustic modems. We were able to send messages to the ASV. However, we were not able to receive messages from the ASV. We believe that the acoustic modem mounted on the ASV is not configured correctly and this theory will be confirmed tomorrow.
