Officially past the halfway point of the fall semester, we’re finally starting to get into the groove of things. Today’s pool test went quite smoothly despite some hiccups at the start.
Please also see the ode of appreciation for today.
Gross Hall Issues
Back in the lab, before we started pool testing, we had some scares with the voltage sensor when some electrical touch-ups was being done on Oogway. Fortunately, Jill was able to fix the sensor, and despite setting a goal of leaving Gross at 1:30pm, we left closer to 1:50pm. This procedure was fine for the most part — things certainly could have been worse if we were doing larger changes on Oogway. Thus, given the totality of circumstances, our previous discussions on having Oogway mostly ready to go by the end of the meeting Thursday is absolutely something we need to stick with, as the most we want something to go wrong is exactly what we saw here, something that can be fixed quickly and results in us still being able to test. I think this is a good balance between making hardware changes to the robot while ensuring we can pool test.
As a part of our rush, we decided to take a shortcut and brought Oogway down some stairs. Karstan, Max, and I tried to carry the cart down as much as we could, but given the pitch of the stairs the back wheels hit the stairs quite a few times. Thankfully, the wheels are fat and thus pretty good at shock absorption. This saved us 10 minutes, though, and is probably something we want to continue to do.
For the return trip, Avrick and I tried something similar, albeit much sketchier — we went through an upward path in the woods. The pines on the ground made the path extremely slippery, and the cart almost tipped over more than once. While this did save us a lot of time, it would be good to have a piece of plywood or something of the sort that we could use to gain some traction. We are very thankful for a few tree roots present there.
At the pool
This pool test, we wanted to tie up some loose ends, and didn’t have too much to do. We were poolside at 2:10pm (so only 10 minutes late, not too bad), and after the standard humidity checks, we started off by tuning buoyancy, which was uneventful. Afterwards, we moved into verification of our integrated code, which succeeded in that we were able to run the torpedoes task successfully after a few small changes. We then moved into collecting sonar data. The banner that Niko hacked together worked; however, it was very prone to any currents in the water, especially when our swimmer tried to position it. So, we had to be quick and are unsure of how good our sonar reads are due to the banner yawing at a pretty rapid pace. At this point, we had 20 minutes left, and decided to save DVL characterization for another day, so we uncharacteristically finished early, and headed out (maybe because 30 minutes before, a lifeguard came buy to let us know we had to be done by 4pm, not sure why they are always obsessed with telling us that, see the update from the first pool test post of the semester).
A few brief observations. First, we had to power cycle Oogway once due to issues on the thrusters Arduino. This is much better than before; let’s hope it stays this way, and the issues at competition were due to overheating. Second, the humidity did rise and approach 90%. The robot was still operating fine, however. Despite a vacuum seal and no bubbles from when the robot was in the water, we did see some water inside of the capsule, so this suggests that the new battery cable connection might still be slightly leaking. Our mechanical friends will enjoy adding some more epoxy to that connection.
Concluding Thoughts
All in all, a successful pool test! We will be able to merge in our integrated changes from Spring 2025 and Comp after some linting. Next pool test, we’ll start moving to working on the task-planning algorithms.
Thank you to Karstan for swimming!