UTD AUV Team - Status
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Success at Competition
Well, I was waiting for the final score breakdown to come out, but I think I'll go ahead and make a preliminary post. UT Dallas placed 2nd out of about 25 teams in 2008. U of Maryland took first, ETS took third, and U of Florida took fourth. After having done so poorly in 2007, we were looking forward to merely getting into the finals, but this was really a pleasant surprise. Our second-best ranking was in 2006, where we placed 5th out of a similar number of teams.
We surfaced almost every time we tried in the sonar region, and we never really missed it:
We had a few issues with backgrounding the client, and then not killing it before starting the next run, but we discovered those in time. This caused us to sort of appear to be stopped far away in at least one practice run. In another, I'm not sure if this was the cause, or it was something else, but it looked like it was getting pings from a bunch of places other than at the pinger (though not moving towards them, just turning).
We logged a ton of images this time, unlike the past two years, so we plan to get started on more image analysis type stuff this year. In fact, after the first couple days of practice, where we only had code to bring images into player and log them, we decided to write some stuff up to try to locate the bright orange buoy in the frame. We spent a lot of time messing with this on site and getting a homing algorithm working.
Once we determined that we were having some issues with darkening around the periphery of the frame, we started panning the vehicle around some to hunt for the buoy, and, just in case we missed after we went forward, we made a rectangular movement pattern afterward, just to be sure. We first tried this in the finals, and we not only hit it dead on, but we hit it a second time in that rectangular pattern. The buoy task probably added 3-4 minutes to the runtime, but it worked out in the end. Without the buoy task, we were typically taking 4:30 to 5 minutes to go from the dock to finish, grabbing the safe along the way.
I'll make another post when the scores come out. Also, here is the UTD news center story. We picked up a brief mention in Slashdot, too. ¶ MichaelP @ 12:40, 0 comments
We surfaced almost every time we tried in the sonar region, and we never really missed it:
 | This means surfacing at least 10 or so times during practice days, as well as in both qualifiers and in the finals. Our rate of grabbing the "safe" was closer to 80-90% of the times we surfaced. The passive grabber worked very well, but we were occasionally not quite centered enough, due to stochastic errors in the sonar processing board not averaging out sufficiently over sub movement. |
We had a few issues with backgrounding the client, and then not killing it before starting the next run, but we discovered those in time. This caused us to sort of appear to be stopped far away in at least one practice run. In another, I'm not sure if this was the cause, or it was something else, but it looked like it was getting pings from a bunch of places other than at the pinger (though not moving towards them, just turning).
We logged a ton of images this time, unlike the past two years, so we plan to get started on more image analysis type stuff this year. In fact, after the first couple days of practice, where we only had code to bring images into player and log them, we decided to write some stuff up to try to locate the bright orange buoy in the frame. We spent a lot of time messing with this on site and getting a homing algorithm working.
Once we determined that we were having some issues with darkening around the periphery of the frame, we started panning the vehicle around some to hunt for the buoy, and, just in case we missed after we went forward, we made a rectangular movement pattern afterward, just to be sure. We first tried this in the finals, and we not only hit it dead on, but we hit it a second time in that rectangular pattern. The buoy task probably added 3-4 minutes to the runtime, but it worked out in the end. Without the buoy task, we were typically taking 4:30 to 5 minutes to go from the dock to finish, grabbing the safe along the way.
I'll make another post when the scores come out. Also, here is the UTD news center story. We picked up a brief mention in Slashdot, too. ¶ MichaelP @ 12:40, 0 comments
