Aqua robot V 1.5 lives

Version 1.5 of the Aqua amphibious robot was tested in a pool for a second time and can swim and navigate efficiently. In fact, it looks substantially superior to it's predecessor. It's fast and turns well, and the yaw behavior seems especially nice (although we don't have numerical data yet). The new model is still having problems with firewire video, but it seems to be an issue with the fiber optic MUX or cables, as opposed to the Point Grey cameras and/or the computing subsystems.

The video problems has caused some grief, especially since we have some very interesting vision algorithms to test. Further, we scheduled to do open water experiments again really soon and it would be good to be able to used this latest version of the robot. With luck, the problems will be figured out and resolved in a few days.