One week to go before our robot sea trials. Things are pretty crazed. Lots of work to do and, of course, there are always those last-minute surprises. Kroy is getting left behind.
06 January
2008
2008
15 January
2008
2008
Today we had a fourth great day of robot systems tests. We also had a small crew from the Discovery Channel visiting for the last two days and grabbing video, and a professional subsea videographer who accompanied us underwater.
Over the last couple of days we operated the robots from shore. This included the first serious open-water untethered test of the robot, and additional walking data on different kinds of terrain type.
The second Aqua-series robot was deployed untethered underwater today, and was controlled using hand gestures, visual servo control, and bar codes. Our collaborators from York university used the same boat dive to collect underwater stereo vision data.
Junaed, John-Paul and myself just offshore
We had a few problems, which is on par for this kind of field trip. This included one person with a minor injury, and a one experiment that didn't work out. As I told my students, if every experiment worked perfectly, we didn't get close enough to the line.
