So lets start with the practice run, which was largely an impressive success, due to tether length issues we were only able to complete the gate mission but after looking back over the logs we were able to see that Seawolf indentified both the bouy and orange marker pointing to the bouy.  After seeing Seawolf do something totally intelligent, we headed back to our tent with high hopes and ready for our next chance at qualifying.  In large we decided to leave Seawolf as she was, fixing a few funky bugs that Chris found but nothing major.  When he time came we quickly headed to the pool, ready to make the most of our last chance.  Once she was on the crane we all crossed our fingers and hoped for the best as a culmination of ten very short months and four very long days was about to hit the water for the final run.  We instructed the diver, blue RFID card to blue tape to start and kill in the event of a restart, red magnet to red tape in the event of a system failure.  Once in the water, the diver swept blue, and Seawolf sprung to life, but with no forward motion, she aligned to the gate, sank to depth, but refused to go for it.  After sitting for a few seconds she began to drift backwards and attempted to pin our poor diver under the dock, and we signaled to kill. After being dragged out from beneath the dock we quicky grabbed a hold of the crane operator Kirk, and hoisted SeaWolf onto the dock.  Throwing our teather down to Brooks, Chris plugged in and started debugging.  After 10 long minutes of bug hunting he stumbled on a bug he had corrected early which was adding an offset to the yaw directional thrusters and pushing Seawolf forward!  After a quick fix we dropped her back in the water and hoped for the best, the driver once again swiped blue and once again she saw the gate, aligned herself, sunk to depth and with only a minute to spare took off toward the gate. B-lining directly through the gate she make a small course correction to align with the orange plank sending us to the bouy, and headed for it.  Sadly, we shortly detoured and missed our target and after some debugging work later we found that a single line of code had left us stuck in the "search for path" mission.  After all we had accomplished this year, that was the least of our worries, we have a working platform from which to build on last year, and we had sucessfully qualified this year, placing us somewhere in the middle of the pack for this years competiton.

More to come.. but I'm too tired right now.  Hope you've enjoyed following us and I look forward to blogging our design process and competition again in the following year!  Thanks to everyone who's shown an interest in SeaWolf and please continue to, we're only going up from here!

I'll start with yesterday thought, kind of a frustrating day for us.  Seawolf was having bugs creep up that were about as off the wall as they come.  During our qualification run Seawolf was having trouble doing anything but spinning in circles and trying to attack our poor diver.  It's quickly become apparent that when Seawolf goes into a spin the extruded aluminum coming off the rear of our craft acts as a rather scary weapon in addition to the handles they were intended.  The divers are nimble though and averted any injury but after trying to take him out a few times, we pulled our ornery bot out of the water and set to debugging.  While we're not 100% sure what was causing the problem it appears it was related to attempting to use our magnetic kill switch as a mission start.  Surprise, surprise, electronics + magnets = problems.

We quickly scheduled a practice run and sadly... we found similar results.  Seawolf was in a mood to fight and little else.  After a bit of messing around and some debugging at TRANSDEC we headed out in somewhat low spirits.  On our way out of Point Loma we happned to see another van, and it was on.  After the necessary egging on back and forth, we found that it was virginia tech, both in our 15 person rental vans.  We took off and they followed suit.  With engines roaring (a rather impressive sound, not that that translated to much in terms of speed) we barreled through San Diego.  We have the superior craft when it comes to vans though and we were eventually forced off the road as our destination approached, but there's nothing like a roaring engine (regardless of speed.. and with loaded vans there wasn't much of that) to introduce a little injection of some much needed fun into the evening. 

After grabbing a bite a Baha Fresh we headed back to the Kona Kai only to discover a full scale Luau taking place right outside our door. We took in some sights and sounds for a few minutes before packing up Seawolf and heading to the pool to correct our rather disabled craft.  After returning to our RFID card mission start system we found some improvement, at least now all of our motots were staying on, we still had some issues to debug with our yaw PID (control code).  Chris started correcting problems one by one and pretty soon, SeaWolf knew what straight was again.  With our problems solved we moved onto testing our vision bouy bumping code.

Because of the lighting in the pool, the orange bouys were showing up white, not something we were prepared to deal with, however due to Micheal and Jeffery's hard work on vision and interesintg "find the closest thing to what color we're looking for" code the red on my swim trunks quickly became a suitable target.  Torro, torro, torro!.  After some minor corrections we were quickly heading the right direction and with good time.

After all of Chris's contributions for the day he took the chance to grab some sleep while our vision guys were hard at work, but once they were done it was time to mix our "go straight" and "find the gate" code.  After waking Chris we attempted to re-test the "go straight" code with scary results, again seawolf was lost, and going in circles.  Frustrated, cold from being in the water and beat Kevin and I hopped into the hot tub to relax for a few minutes.  I was quickly requested back in the pool, and in no time, seawolf was once again on the right track.

So here we are, back at transdec, with our practice run coming in less than an hour.  We're currently mixing the vision and go straight code hoping for the best results.  Wish us luck, and we'll be back shortly!

So with that, lets move on to the slightly more humorous.  For one, we've discovered why crafts seem to like to break here... magnetic rocks. (see pictures)  We dropped our magnetic kill switch and upon picking it up discovered there were some little friends hanging on. They weren't metal shavings, but rocks.  And we wonder why the magnetic compasses go nuts here.  Yeesh.

On another note, we have apparently been doing some chemistry experiments with SeaWolf without knowing.  Yesterday we noticed one of our Fischer connectors was eroding and that the aluminum underneath was growing some interesting designs.  We assumed that something in the sharpie we had used to color code the connectors was eroding the material, we were wrong.... very, very wrong.  Last night during a late night pool test there was a mass exodus of tiny bubbles from the acoustics Fischer connector, scaring the hell out of me.  (first thought being, oh god, Seawolf is sinking)  Because of the earlier corrosion we ripped SeaWolf out of the water as quickly as possible only to discover a miniscule amount water had actually leaked in... Not at all matching what had sparked the panic.  Brooks was quick to the conclusion that based on the "corrosion" taking place on our frame that what was probably actually happening was that SeaWolf was performing electrolysis and electroplating her frame with the Fischer connector's aluminum.  After some testing we concluded that the connector was indeed powered (9V and god only knows how many amps) and our pretty little (haha... little...) lady was acting as a ground.  Since then the connectors been removed and Kevin has been working on getting the connector redone this morning.

Last night we also completed work on some basic acoustics code which will allow us to locate the pinger in a yaw direction and head towards it until vision can take over.  Vision also pool tested our path detector and follower so that we can hopefully do a bit more than make it under the gate when we qualify today!

So what are we doing to fix it? We're currently swapping out the thrusters to gives us the two "new" thrusters we just received from SeaBotix a few weeks ago on the port and starboard directional motors.  These motors have been recorded and should have basically the same characteristics when it comes to thrust.  The craft is naturally fairly stable when it comes to pitch and roll and we also have PIDs that will correct any errors that occur there so unbalanced thrusters aren't as big of an issue.  For our forward direction we currently rely on vision or acoustics pretty much solely, no magnetic compass or any other form of sensors rely.  This wouldn't be such a big issue except that once we're within about 10 ft of the gate we lose site of it and go into dead reckoning mode.

Assuming that the unbalanced thrusters aren't the issue we're currently dealing with, we are also doing what we can to get our IMU's magnetic compass working.  It's got quite some drift when we pole constantly but we're hoping that maybe by using a technique in which the engines are turned off, the IMU is polled and then the motor is kicked back on.  This gives us a brief period where the lightening storm of magnetic interference of the motors doesn't affect the compass values.

(PS, jsut got word our torpedo flys 4-6ft!)

When we arrived, after some minor confusion (and lots of moving heaving bags around between vehicles) we finally hopped in our 12 person van, and headed out in search of some food and our resort the Kona Kai.  On the way to the hotel we passed Umi Sushi, an apparent club favorite of past years.  A couple of failures in communication and Kevin's opting to wistle that stereotypical asian song out loud before realizing what exactly he was doing gave us a good laugh and a chance to relax after the travels.  We also discovered that we are indeed too far west to find sweet tea, but such things can be overlooked if the weather's going to stay like it is today.

After our massive ship full of sushi (click picture below to see more shots) we headed over to the Kona Kai for the "welcome to AUVSI" meeting at 2 which contained the usual amount of "do this"'s and "don't do that"'s one would expect before 30 robotics teams are sent onto a high tech naval base.  Dave seems to be an interesting guy for those who have been here before.  After a few teams asked questions until the end of time about things that they'll either find out tomorrow or couldn't change anyway the meeting was over and we headed back to our thankfully ajoining rooms, staring straight out at the bay and some rather beautiful (expensive) looking boats.  Since getting back we've been setting up networks for our local SVN magic and trying to get seawolf put together so we can run some pool tests tonight.  Currently, one room is the robot room (check out the pictures below) and the other is for people who needs sleep or who just aren't in the mix at this particular moment.  We've opted to move assembly and soldering outdoors due to the weather (yeah... I'm going to be talking about that a lot... it's just too nice here not to) and the fact that given a choice, we'd like to be invited back here.  Well that's about it for now, enjoy the pictures, we've got an early day coming tomorrow, our registered time for unloading at TRANSDEC is 7:30PST, or to make it sound better, 10:30EST.  Maybe I'll make another post after seawolf hits the water this evening.  Off to dinner and maybe Fry's to look for a gyro!