Yesterday we continued to test our vehicle. We arrived early and manage to complete 3 tests including a 1h15 test and 55 minutes test. All and all, we were able to confirm that our passive sonar system is working well. We completed the pinger tasks successfully several time. We were also able to complete the buoy tasks several time too.You can look at our twitter page for more information.
At the end of the day we selected our 1st qualification time. Here is the order
Check our twitter page during the qualifying run, we will tweet what we manage to achieve after our run at 1h30pm.
Today was the first day at the competition site. We arrived the first one at the competition at 5h45am ready to compete. This was necessary to get as much practice time as possible. We need to take turns with the other teams to have 30 minute periods at a time in the Transdec.
This morning the hard drive of our SVN server crashed. We have been working locally on our laptops. At the end of the day we bought a brand new Solid State disk to replace the broken one. This SSD disk will be a lot more robust. We restored a backup and around midnight the server was back up.
During testing, we successfully completed the mission gate, pipe and buoys.
We also set up two live feeds directly from Transdec. We will do our best to keep them up until the end of the competition. Look at the top for the link.
Finally we completed the JAUS challenge minus 25% because we ran it on our simulator. We will run it on the vehicle tomorrow.
Come back tomorrow for more updates!
We did more testing today. We confirmed that our passive sonar system is working. We were able to follow the pinger's signal. We also made a half size hedge to be able to test our hedge detector at the pool of our hotel. We successfully passed the hedge in the pool. We are really satisfied since the hedge we passed is much smaller than the official one in the obstacle course.
Great news from our software team. We completed the JAUS communication protocol today. During the end of the day we incorporated our JAUS library in our decision center. Now JAUS works on our AUV and our simulator.
We also attended our orientation meeting. We received our badges to get on the competition site and had a chance to ask questions to Dave. There will be 22 teams participating this year.
Tomorrow, we wake up at 5 AM to be early at the competition site.
Stay tune, more updates to come.
Today, three members of the team spent most of the afternoon at Teledyne RD Instruments to calibrate our DVL. During calibration, we discovered that one of the four channels was faulty. After deeper investigation, we found that there was a problem with the chassis. We received a temporary chassis by RD Instruments to keep testing while ours is in for repair. We would like to thank Teledyne RD Instruments for their continued support and great service.
Our software developers were hard at work on the JAUS communication protocol. We have now completed the Management Service, the Discovery Service and Access Control Service. We hope to finish the challenge tomorrow.
Our vision team spent the day improving the reliability of our hedge and counsellor vision filters.
Tomorrow we will have the team orientation meeting. We will also continue to test our vehicle and software.
More news to come!
After two days of travelling and waiting at the airport, we are finally all in San Diego! We were supposed to arrive Saturday July 10 around 11am in San Diego. Well, it did not happen like this at all. We had problem at the security check in Montreal. Because of that, we miss our flight. Of course, there were not eight seats available on the next flight for Chicago, our connection point to San Diego. The team got separated on several different flights. Three members left two hours later for Chicago, from there only two members took a flight to San Diego. The other person had to wait four hours for another flight. Another member of our team left Montreal a bit later and met the one waiting for his flight in Chicago but they were not schedule for the same flight for San Diego. Luckily, there was enough space for them to fly together to get to San Diego. The rest of the team was suppose to take a flight eight hours later going to Washington and then to San Diego. Everyone that went to Chicago made its way to San Diego. Unfortunately, the people that were supposed to pass by Washington got their flight cancelled, the air plane was broken. Their flight was rescheduled to Sunday instead of Saturday. Our story is not over yet! The four members who got to San Diego quickly discover that some baggages did not follow at all. Even worst, the people from United Airline were not even able to tell us where the baggages were exactly. To make a short story, the last four members of our team arrived Sunday around 8pm. All of our missing bagagges arrived on Sunday.
Once the rest of the team arrived and once we had all of our equipment, we assemble the submarine and made sure that everything was in working condition. Tomorrow we will be testing the vehicle in the marina behind the hotel.
One funny fact, our bottle of flux, a very sticky liquid that helps solder components to PCBs, broke during the flight. We had to clean everything that was in the same box.
