Mission Testing

Since the leak and thruster failures last week, the team has gotten SubjuGator 7 back up and running. The team has been busy developing and debugging missions for the RoboSub competition. The videos below showcase our current progress on several fronts. Our vision system has been working very well, even in varying outdoor lighting conditions (fitting for the San Diego coast). Hopefully all of our outdoor testing will be advantageous come competition time. The first video demonstrates template id
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Raining Cats and Submarines

We had an unexpected visitor stop by today. Her name is Debby. Tropical Storm Debby, that is. However, she didn’t stop us from testing at the pool. 30 mph winds, drenching rain (the sub didn’t mind), and a few waterlogged engineers can’t stop our motivation. We’re excited to have successfully completed all of our goals for the day, despite the wet inconvenience. As of the time of this post, it has been raining for 14 straight hours. Go Gators!
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Last day of testing!

Yesterday marked the last day of in-water testing of SubjuGator 7 before it began its voyage to San Diego. Unfortunately, there happened to be a tropical storm bearing down on us at the same time. Lucky for us the sub is waterproof (laptops are not). We traveled to three different pools throughout the day (different pool hours) to debug as many mission behaviors as we could before it got dark and the heavier storms began to hit. We were able to successfully debug the pipe and buoy missions. The
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Calibrations and tuning

After a few small thruster leakage setbacks, we’ve officially completed all of the calibration and tuning procedures for SubjuGator 7. We’re using a new nonlinear controller this year, which is achieving outstanding transient performance and steady-state tracking errors over last year’s PD. We’re able to successfully move to desired waypoints and orientations using our real-time C3 continuous trajectory generator. Here is a photo of the controller tuning process at the po
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Poolside updates

We’ve been spending as many hours at the pool as possible this weekend. The full assembled vehicle got its feet wet for the first time this past week. Since then, we’ve had a lot of success and only a few small bugs to work out. The Kalman filter is converging and the thruster mapper and primitive driver components are working as expected. Tomorrow’s goal is to integrate the LPOSVSS with the local waypoint driver, trajectory generator, and controller. Assuming all goes well, we
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