ROVing Otter

A web-controlled UNDERWATER ROBOT for ocean education and research

PROGRESS LOG for Sep 2009

18 September 2009:

After over 2-1/2 years of basically sitting on a shelf, ROVing Otter is finally getting some much-needed attention.

But why the long wait? Well, as mentioned in the previous log entry (Feb 2007), Steve got swamped with department chair duties and had no time to work on ROVing Otter or any other projects. Some of the "other" projects that got pushed onto the back burner along with ROVing Otter included some funded projects that took priority when Steve's term as Department Chair ended. One of these was a fun wildlife surveillance project using technology similar to that in ROVing Otter, except that it's on dry land. School kids get to deploy portable, solar-powered web cameras in the woods, leave them there, then return to school and monitor the camera images over the internet to "spy" on wildlife. In addition, Steve has been spending LOTS of time working with Vickie Jensen, Harry Bohm, and Jill Zande to finish writing a book called "Underwater Robotics: Science, Design, and Fabrication" for the Marine Advanced Techology Education Center.

Anyway, Steve is no longer Department Chair, the final report for the wildlife camera project was submitted last week, and the ROV book is nearly finished, so it seemed time to think about putting ROVing Otter back in the water!

Unfortunately, a lot had happened to ROVing Otter during that 2-1/2 years. It got moved and demonstrated a few times and pulled apart to show people stuff, and, well, things got damaged. Grad students like Shane Anderson in Steve's lab had also pulled things apart to try adding some other features, like a pressure gauge from an old scuba system to display remaining air tank pressure, but that never got finished. The wires going to the camera had gotten damaged somewhere along the line, so the connection to the camera would come and go unpredictably. The headlights kept falling out of their sockets, leaving the ROV one-eyed or completely dark. One of the lasers was intermittent, and their alignment was WAY off. In addition, the motors had gotten a bit "stiff" from lack of use (coupled, no doubt with their former flooding, which had left at least one of them a bit rusty.)

But perhaps the biggest disaster was a hard-disk crash that occurred during Steve's term as chair. Steve had made the classic mistake and not backed up adequately, so the most recent version of the source code for ROVing Otter was lost. That program was (and still is) in ROVing Otter's brain, so ROVing Otter can run using that program, but it cannot be extracted from ROVing Otter. The latest version of the source code Steve has is known to be an older version that was not yet working. ROVing Otter can continue to run on its existing program, but if the software is to be upgraded, a new (untested and probably non-functional) program will need to be downloaded into the Rabbit RCM3700, and that will erase the only working copy in existence -- a very scary prospect.

Today, I finally decided to do some repairs and testing and see if I could get ROVing Otter going again, at least in the lab. I replaced the camera cable and put springs on the lights to hold them firmly in their sockets. I then went through a full set of tests of the electronics. Other than some electronic compass problems, which I've been completely able to cure, everything seemed to work well in local mode. Hopefully, someday soon I'll get a chance to put it back in the water for a dive. I think I'll do that a few more times for fun before erasing its functional brain and begining the (probably long) period of debugging the new program.