UTD AUV Team - Status
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Vision Update
Edge-detect no longer crashes on certain source images. The bug in edge-detect is a reference-tracking issue. Not wanting to debug the massive decision tree that produces the output, I have replaced all of the nontrivial memory management with the Boehm garbage collector. This doesn't solve the problem of the output being poor in edge cases, but it does keep the program from crashing on images it doesn't like, while still maintaining sufficient speed to run inside the vision pipeline.
For the record, attempting to mass free everything yourself using brk causes a segmentation fault. Ignoring free and execing the program after every frame works, but is too slow to be practical in a real-time problem, such as vision.
The new vision code will be in svn as soon as I can move the changes to a clean copy of the source from the one with all of the cruft from trying to deal with this problem. ¶ kd5bjo @ 09:19, 0 comments
For the record, attempting to mass free everything yourself using brk causes a segmentation fault. Ignoring free and execing the program after every frame works, but is too slow to be practical in a real-time problem, such as vision.
The new vision code will be in svn as soon as I can move the changes to a clean copy of the source from the one with all of the cruft from trying to deal with this problem. ¶ kd5bjo @ 09:19, 0 comments
Fwd: AVR Progress
From Michael, yesterday morning. I understand that he's was working on this most of yesterday, too; I don't know how far along he is right now.
(When I say "I", I've had a lot of assistance from Randy, Ed, and Solomon.)
I've implemented some stuff in the last 24 hours (nothing has been tested,
but it compiles) :
implemented for comms) :
(When I say "I", I've had a lot of assistance from Randy, Ed, and Solomon.)
I've implemented some stuff in the last 24 hours (nothing has been tested,
but it compiles) :
- RS-485 and STX/ETX
- motor control
- depth sense
- battery voltage sense
- a2d that is nonblocking (unlike the avrlib stuff)
implemented for comms) :
- marker dropper
- compass
- kill switch reading
- power control over camera bus
- device presence
- kill relay (???)
Friday, June 30, 2006
Some Background
For those of you who happen to stumble across this site without a proper introduction, perhaps I should let you know what this whole thing is about.
I am one of the senior members of the AUV team at the University of Texas at Dallas. We are preparing an entry for AUVSI's 9th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. Fundamentally, we have to make a robotic submarine that performs several tasks underwater completely without human interaction. I will try to explain the various bits we need to do as I talk about the state of the various systems that try to accomplish each task. If you don't want to wait for that, you can read the official mission. ¶ kd5bjo @ 13:56, 0 comments
I am one of the senior members of the AUV team at the University of Texas at Dallas. We are preparing an entry for AUVSI's 9th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. Fundamentally, we have to make a robotic submarine that performs several tasks underwater completely without human interaction. I will try to explain the various bits we need to do as I talk about the state of the various systems that try to accomplish each task. If you don't want to wait for that, you can read the official mission. ¶ kd5bjo @ 13:56, 0 comments
Welcome
With only a month to go before the competition, I am getting regular inquiries about the progress of the AUV. Rather than having to repeat myself all the time, I will try to post status updates here as often as I can. Our original plan was to have all of the hardware working by July 1. That seems to be unlikely to happen, but we should at least be in the water.
¶ kd5bjo @ 13:19, 0 comments
