UTD AUV Team - Status
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
New Boards
Well, the boards are starting to roll in, so I thought I'd provide a brief rundown on what's here so far. First up is the new relay board:
This board passes all the power in the sub, and is responsible for turning the sub on and off, as well as managing the competition-required kill switch for the motors. A number of improvements have been made, but the most important one is better protection for the AVR that reads the status of the switch, so we have fewer problems using it for the secondary function of starting the run while potentially disconnected. This is a step towards being slightly less reliant on a connection to start the sub: we may well get one shot at a run, instead of zero, even when we lack a decent wireless connection.
Next up is an interim sonar solution. It works reasonably well, but is targetted solely at 2008:
The two LEDs on top are power indicators, while the three arranged vertically each light briefly for a ping received on a particular hydrophone.
It is a signal conditioning board that allows relatively simple digital processing to measure time-difference of arrival. Finally, here's a shot of the bottom:
The boards were fabricated by Advanced Circuits, and were populated very rapidly by a great local company called CDS. We did modify a couple spots due to some design oversights, but it's turning out well overall. It's getting close to time to take these out to the pool now. ¶ MichaelP @ 17:05, 0 comments
This board passes all the power in the sub, and is responsible for turning the sub on and off, as well as managing the competition-required kill switch for the motors. A number of improvements have been made, but the most important one is better protection for the AVR that reads the status of the switch, so we have fewer problems using it for the secondary function of starting the run while potentially disconnected. This is a step towards being slightly less reliant on a connection to start the sub: we may well get one shot at a run, instead of zero, even when we lack a decent wireless connection.
Next up is an interim sonar solution. It works reasonably well, but is targetted solely at 2008:
The two LEDs on top are power indicators, while the three arranged vertically each light briefly for a ping received on a particular hydrophone.
It is a signal conditioning board that allows relatively simple digital processing to measure time-difference of arrival. Finally, here's a shot of the bottom:
The boards were fabricated by Advanced Circuits, and were populated very rapidly by a great local company called CDS. We did modify a couple spots due to some design oversights, but it's turning out well overall. It's getting close to time to take these out to the pool now. ¶ MichaelP @ 17:05, 0 comments
Monday, June 09, 2008
Gazebo
It's been a long while since an update, but we're alive. Really. Well, most of us are.
Anyhow, one thing that made significant progress last Fall was getting Gazebo up and running. It's a custom build of v0.5.2. Thanks again to CU Denver for the suggestion in 2005. Here's a screenshot, before I continue:
Shown in the picture is actually a default "world" packaged with Gazebo, but we've changed the model out to look/behave like our sub, down to the visual details of our hydrophones, Seabotix motors, and the aluminum framing. I unfortunately only have scale drawings of the center portion of the pool, which is not where we operate, so a more accurate environment is not in the foreseeable future.
The physics are something of a hack, since ODE lacked any sort of buoyancy calculations. It nevertheless seems to be qualitatively good, and therefore useful for testing out the clients. For that matter, the rendering of the water is somewhat silly, too, merely being alpha-blended billboards. Volumetric fogging would be the next step, but time is always short, so further updates will wait until the Fall.
There has not been time to add sonar support yet, but the main concern there right now is the robustness of the hardware, so, until that is nailed down, the simulator would have to remain very fluid. ¶ MichaelP @ 12:57, 0 comments
Anyhow, one thing that made significant progress last Fall was getting Gazebo up and running. It's a custom build of v0.5.2. Thanks again to CU Denver for the suggestion in 2005. Here's a screenshot, before I continue:
Shown in the picture is actually a default "world" packaged with Gazebo, but we've changed the model out to look/behave like our sub, down to the visual details of our hydrophones, Seabotix motors, and the aluminum framing. I unfortunately only have scale drawings of the center portion of the pool, which is not where we operate, so a more accurate environment is not in the foreseeable future.
The physics are something of a hack, since ODE lacked any sort of buoyancy calculations. It nevertheless seems to be qualitatively good, and therefore useful for testing out the clients. For that matter, the rendering of the water is somewhat silly, too, merely being alpha-blended billboards. Volumetric fogging would be the next step, but time is always short, so further updates will wait until the Fall.
There has not been time to add sonar support yet, but the main concern there right now is the robustness of the hardware, so, until that is nailed down, the simulator would have to remain very fluid. ¶ MichaelP @ 12:57, 0 comments
