Today were the final runs of the AUVs. After the qualification, we ranked in 9th position out of the 10 teams that made it in the final. Our team was able to do one test in the morning to validate that our software was working properly. Our final round was at noon. Unfortunately, it seems Murphy was still close. We were not able to do more than pass the gate. After some analysis of the logs, we found that the problem was a bad setting in our vision software. The settings to detect pipes were not entered properly, thus eliminating our pipe detection capabilities. After 2 minutes of search patterns looking for pipes, our mission timed out and we headed for the pinger since it is worth a lot of points. Because of a problem with the elevation of our passive sonar board, the vehicle was not able to tell when it was above the pinger. To fix this problem we made our vehicle look for the briefcase while navigating toward the pinger to know when we are over the briefcase. During the final run, while heading for the pinger, we passed over the bins. Our vehicle mistook them for the briefcase only for some frames, creating a false positive. Sadly it was enough to enter to grab state but our vehicle could not find the briefcase anymore since it was not there for real. Our vehicle then surfaced in the middle of Transdec. This run gave us the last rank in the final, giving us the 10th position out of 30 teams this year.
We would like to thank all our sponsors who helped us this year. Without each and every one of them we would not have been able to participate to that competition and build this vehicle. Their help was much appreciated and we hope to do business with each of them again next year.
We would also like to thank all the members who worked on the project this year. Without their help, our prototype would not be what it is today.
We would like to congratulate the teams from the University of Victoria and Rhode Island who respectively ranked 2nd and 3rd this year.
Finally, we would like to congratulate the team from Cornell University, CUAUV. They were able to complete the whole obstacle course in less than 12 minutes. They made an extraordinary job that no one has been able to do this year. With that awesome run they ranked 1st.
We will be back to the competition next year for sure so keep watching our website for updates trough out the year as we will do our best to keep you informed of our latest developments.
Good luck to every team and see you all next year!
We had our 2nd qualifying round today. Unfortunately we had problem during the 15 minutes of the qualification. We did not manage to do more then pass the gate. At first we did not know what the problem was. We even did a test 20 minutes after our qualification round and everything was fine. Later the same day, we inspected the logs of the qualification round and found out that our vision server had a communication problem with AUV5, our decision software. Right now we hope that we will make it in the final tomorrow.
The day started really early once again. We had a practice run at 7h00 am to make sure our vision settings were correct. We then had our qualification run at 8h30. We manage to do the following tasks. Gate, pipe, buoy and pipe. We were also able to navigate toward the barbwire and the bombing zone but we ran out of time to complete those tasks. Overall we manage to finish 3rd today after all 23 teams did their qualification run.
We also received the static judging result at the end of the day. ETS finished 2nd place out of the 30 teams. Congratulation to Cornell who finished 1st for a second year in a row.
Tomorrow we will be performing our 2nd qualification run at 15h00. Don’t forget to watch our twitter page for quick update throughout the day.
Team SONIA now has a twitter page where we will be posting small updates during the competition. Follow us here http://twitter.com/soniaauv
The competition has finally started. As usual, the team woke up early, around 5h30 am, and packed up everything to arrive at Transdec first and get the most out of our test day. We in fact arrived first and got the first pool time slot. On our first run, we went through the gate which granted us a place for qualifications. We then proceeded with taking videos of all the tasks the AUV has to accomplish and calibrating the different controllers on our vehicule.
On our second test, we went on testing the bombing zone. We successfully identified the forms and dropped a marker on a target then the mission stopped due to a bug that we quickly tracked down and fixed.
On our third test, we decided to take more video since we were lucky enough to have the sun shining so we could test our vision algorithms in different lighting conditions. Unfortunately, we experienced some buoyancy difficulties and we ran out of batteries near the end of the test.
On our fourth and final test, we went on testing the start of our mission. The DVL successfully helped us go through the gate but we had some trouble finding the pipe and once we reached it the vehicle decided to go backward instead of forward, bug which will be fixed before we go to bed tonight.
In summary, the test day went really well and we were lucky enough to go four times in the test pool. We have lots of video and data to fine tune the navigation and the vision algorithms.
We would also like to thank Matt Burdyny from Teledyne RD Instruments for his support and his visits at the SONIA booth and the hotel. We would also like to thank Beth Berkley from Seabotix for passing by the booth and checking if we needed anything.
