Are you interested in building a robotic submarine? Do you want to get involved in an internationally-recognized, hands-on engineering project?? Then you should consider joining CUAUV! The team will be hosting recruitment info sessions during the next two weeks of classes. Applications will be given out during our info sessions, and will be due Sept. 10, 2010. For more information, see CUAUV recruiting.

The CUAUV engineering project team is very excited to announce their first place finish! Our final run during the international AUVSI competition went nearly perfectly. We hit the targeted buoy, got both torpedoes into the correct window, and dropped both markers in the proper bins, following pipes and passing over hedges along the way. After the second hedge, however, Tachyon stopped and held its position until our run time had expired. Later analysis suggests that one of the hydrophones boards encountered a fluke error and crashed. Ironically, this happened during our last run yet the hydrophone system has worked flawlessly for several months.

Even with the unexpected hydrophones behavior, we completed a relatively significant portion of the course, earning us first place. We look forward to applying what we learned this year to the creation of our next vehicle.

The AUVSI foundation have been posting a few recaps from the 2010 international AUV competition; these can be found on the AUVSI Foundation YouTube account or the AUV competition website.

The day one recap covers Friday, the first day of qualifying rounds, and the day two recap covers Saturday, the second day of qualifiers.

The day three recap covers the finals on Sunday.

Finally, to hold everyone over until the official scoresheets are released by the AUVSI, CUAUV presents our records of the competition scoreboard and schedule. While we believe our ranking information and schedule to be accurate, the score tallies are only our best estimations; we do not know exactly how much partial credit judges awarded for certain tasks nor the static judging scores.

The standings are available in the original ODS spreadsheet format or the XLS spreadsheet format.

For convenience, we also have this data in (somewhat messier) tables on this site.

A few notes about the notation used:
P/S/O Wpn = Primary weapon, Secondary weapon, weapon of Opportunity, respectively.
Buoy = hit any buoy (500 points)
Buoys = hit correct two buoys in order (1500 points)
Water = went in the water, but received no points
None = skipped their run

For those of you who have not been following twitter, Tachyon performed very well in our practice earlier today. Our first attempt was a nearly perfect run, hitting both the yellow and orange buoy, shooting both torpedoes into the blue window and dropping markers into the clipper and axe bins.

We then tried an untethered autonomous that had to be cut short when Tachyon strafed into the wall after passing the hedge. The problem was concluded to be a missed pipe followed by a slightly miscalculated heading angle. These problems have been fixed for our final run at 4:15pm.

Make sure to follow our final run on the webcast!

The competition webcast can be found here or on the AUVSI competition main page. Webcast will be available Sunday, July 18 (today) 1:00-5:00pm pacific time.

Today the team focused on improving Tachyon’s torpedo firing abilities. We spent a lot of time in the dolphin pool making changes to the fire time of the torpedoes and the depth at which they are pushed into the launcher tube.

In our first practice run, Tachyon managed to complete the validation gate, pipe, hedge and buoy missions. Tachyon fired the torpedo into the yellow window instead of the blue, and failed to pick up the counselor. In the second practice, Tachyon completed all the tasks perfectly including the torpedo fire, but failed to drop the counselor at the end of mission. Our qualification run had similar results to our practices: gate, one buoy, fired torpedo but missed targeted window, bins, hedge, recovered counselor but did not release.

We placed first in the qualification rounds (all team’s results in previous post) allowing us first pick in tomorrow time slots –practice 11:00pm, finals 4:15pm.

Our goal for tomorrow is the same as always: to run the course.

Today was an eventful day at the competition. We had two practice runs and our first qualifying run. After a few false starts, we were able to run buoy, pipe, hedge, windows (got 1 torpedo through an incorrect window due to a actuator issue), hydrophone to to recovery zone, pick up the recover object, surface, and release the object. We also gave our static judging presentation, and placed first in static judging. Tonight, after going out to a sit-down mexican dinner to celebrate, we are working on our pneumatic system to hopefully increase reliability for firing torpedoes. Tomorrow we are hoping to be able to run the course.

Today we continued to tackle Tachyon’s vision issues with the sun’s glare. We tried numerous solutions including making a camera lens shroud and switching out our Firewire Guppy camera for a webcam. Ultimately we determined the Firewire Guppy camera was still advantageous and our software team resolved our vision problems through coding. During our last practice slot of the day, we ran an autonomous run, which included going through the validation gate and hedge, hitting the orange buoy, sensing the pinger, and recovering and surfacing with the counselor.
Tonight we are working on continuing to tune the bin and buoy code, and work on our active grabber. Tomorrow we will test the modified vision code in practice. Our static judging time is at 3:00pm, and our qualifying run is at 5:00pm.

Above: The camera lens shroud; The team attaching the counselor grabber

Today, the software team completed the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) student interoperability challenge. This is the first year JAUS is contributing to the AUVSI competition scoring system. JAUS is the premier interoperability standard for unmanned systems, used in a variety of commercial and industrial applications worldwide. The interoperability Challenge for 2010 required CUAUV to interact with a control and monitoring system using these industry standard protocols.

Above: Team with Wes Brown, a student challenge judge from the Unmanned Systems and Robotics Interoperability Center (USARIC).

Today was our first day out at Transdec. We have been using our practice slots to acquire imagery and tune our vision systems. We have also been testing our hydrophones, which are working very well. We've had two practice slots so far and are scheduled for a third later today. Be sure to check out our Competition 2010 image gallery and follow our twitter feed for more up-to-date coverage of our time in San Diego.