First Day of Competition

Yesterday was the first day of competition. We arrived at 7:00 am to unload our equipment and set up our booth. Each team has a tent with a couple of tables; these tents circle the perimeter of the TRANSDEC (that’s what the facility is called) and surround the pool. “Pool” isn’t quite an accurate word, though; this thing is closer to a big pond. Our booth is wedged beside the University of Marlyand, which has—lets’ count them—13 team members skittering around. They are busy, busy bees. On our other side is Amador Valley High School Robotics Club. We’re pretty impressed that a bunch of high schoolers are competing alongside undergraduate and graduate students. The kind of skills needed to compete here aren’t exactly taught in the average high school. Kudos to them.

We found ourselves making a madcap trip to Home Depot when we suddenly started missing the practice crate that Chris constructed back in Texas. Lots of PVC pipe, orange electrical tape, and one hour later, we had ourselves an orange crate to practice finding and picking up.

Down to the nitty-gritty: we recalibrated the PIDs for the depth sensor. This means that in the morning, Seahorse was listing back and forth, fluttering in the water, but once we recalibrated it, it became much more stable. We also acquired the correct color value for the buoy and the safe, and we did acquisition and tracking on those things. (Meaning that we found out the exact color of the buoy and were able to find them in the water.) Lastly we listened for actual pinger data on the real hydrophones and adjusted our robot to the competition frequencies.

We had three practice times yesterday. We qualified for the competition on the very first try by driving through an underwater gate. These practices were more than just practice, though. Our performances then determine who gets to choose their competition times first.

And that was yesterday. Now let’s see about today.