VT AUVT

Our first qualification run was scheduled for 11:30 this morning, and we worked very hard last night on the vision code with the hope that we could find the buoy.  Since we hadn’t tested our latest validation gate program yet, we signed up for a practice slot and got in the big pool at 10:15.  The practice slots are now half as long as they were on the practice days, so we decided to head for the gate as many times as we could in 15 minutes.  Barreleye made it through on the third try, then our time was up.  We worked frantically to get the camera working before our qualifying run, and we finally got the code to compile right before the time came to start the run.

We decided that running completely untested code wasn’t the best idea, so we switched back to the validation gate program we practiced with.  When the diver started the run, Barreleye decided to go up instead of down, and didn’t dive.   I yet again fell back to the manual dead-reckoning system from pre-qualifying, and guessed that the heading to the gate.  Starting the run over, Barreleye headed off to the left of the gate, which was to be expected.  I adjusted the heading settings while Ben tried to capture some video, and we tried again.  This time the AUV acted like a drunk and twitched off towards the center of the pool.  This was a problem we had never encountered before and we had no idea what was happening.   After some loud troubleshooting, we discovered that Ben had decided to compress the video as it was being captured, and the compression algorithm was taking up all of our processing power.  We only had two minutes left in the run, so we decided to run it without recording any video.  This time she finally made her way slowly straight through the gate, and with only nine seconds to spare. We were elated that we had scored points, and headed back to the booth with much more relaxed attitudes.

After our non-failure during the first qualification run, we are working hard on finding the “flare” with the camera, and we are hoping to score more points in qualifying tomorrow!