IAUVC Day 4 – Recap
Posted on August 6th, 2005 in Latest News
Here’s just a little recap from day 4.
The morning was spent getting some good data. We got out of the water around 9:30 or 10:00. Static judging started around 11:40 AM. We didn’t get back in the water between because there wasn’t enough time.
Static judging went well … we thought. Clean polished presentation. Covered everything we wanted. But, there was one judge that took great delight in grilling us over the "mechanical" aspects of the robot and how much student involvement there was. We’re all electrical engineers, so obviously our strengths aren’t in mechanical design. That’s why we’re so fortunate to have Vortex and the folks there that are some amazing machinists.
After judging Sterling continued to work on software and Matt, Jim, and I went to the BasicMicro "headquarters" to pick up some extra BasicAtoms. We had killed one the previous day and only had one extra.
BasicMicro was basically a loading bay. Pretty interesting place. We talked for a while to Nathan, the brains behind the operation, and he ended up donating two Atoms to the team. Thanks Nathan!
We came back to Transdec around 2:30 PM and were able to finally swim around 3:30 PM. On our first run the robot made it through the gate and found the docking station and "docked." Unfortunately, the sunlight was at such an angle as to confuse the vision software.
All the practice slots were filled for the rest of the day so we packed up and waited for the static judging results.
Pretty disappointing. We got 14th out of 19th. Everyone was pretty upset about that. Cornell got 1st place. MIT and Duke were also in the top 5.
Frankie and Sterling went to sleep and the rest of us went out for dinner. We came back around 11 PM and Jim, Frankie, and Sterling started working in the hotel pool. Jim woke me up around 6 AM and I let him sleep. We packed up the robot around 8:30 AM and came back to Transdec.
The morning was spent getting some good data. We got out of the water around 9:30 or 10:00. Static judging started around 11:40 AM. We didn’t get back in the water between because there wasn’t enough time.
Static judging went well … we thought. Clean polished presentation. Covered everything we wanted. But, there was one judge that took great delight in grilling us over the "mechanical" aspects of the robot and how much student involvement there was. We’re all electrical engineers, so obviously our strengths aren’t in mechanical design. That’s why we’re so fortunate to have Vortex and the folks there that are some amazing machinists.
After judging Sterling continued to work on software and Matt, Jim, and I went to the BasicMicro "headquarters" to pick up some extra BasicAtoms. We had killed one the previous day and only had one extra.
BasicMicro was basically a loading bay. Pretty interesting place. We talked for a while to Nathan, the brains behind the operation, and he ended up donating two Atoms to the team. Thanks Nathan!
We came back to Transdec around 2:30 PM and were able to finally swim around 3:30 PM. On our first run the robot made it through the gate and found the docking station and "docked." Unfortunately, the sunlight was at such an angle as to confuse the vision software.
All the practice slots were filled for the rest of the day so we packed up and waited for the static judging results.
Pretty disappointing. We got 14th out of 19th. Everyone was pretty upset about that. Cornell got 1st place. MIT and Duke were also in the top 5.
Frankie and Sterling went to sleep and the rest of us went out for dinner. We came back around 11 PM and Jim, Frankie, and Sterling started working in the hotel pool. Jim woke me up around 6 AM and I let him sleep. We packed up the robot around 8:30 AM and came back to Transdec.
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