Harvey Mudd + Cal Poly meetup

Today was an exciting day! At noon, we (the Cal Poly team) met up with the Harvey Mudd students, Dr. Clark, and Dr. Gambin who traveled from Malta to meet with us this weekend. We all introduced ourselves to each other and had lunch at our favorite Greek cafe downtown. Following lunch, we carpooled over to a Cal Poly professor's house (Dr. Workman), who generously rented us her pool for the day to deploy into and test hardware.

The HMC students showed us their Robot Operating System (ROS) based data logging program, which will be extremely beneficial to the data collection process on-site. After that, we set up and deployed both ROVs into the pool to collect data. Both ROV systems are fully functional and we even have some exciting new sensors to log temperature and salinity information this year.

The team collected their first sonar data of the pool, which was very good for a first run. The sonar scans converged in our mapping algorithm and we have a decent map of the pool.

Pool map 

Sonar mosaic

The pool had particularly noisy data due to the curvature of the bottom of the pool coupled with the 30 degree sonar capture angle, so this was a very good first deployment.

Tomorrow we will be giving and listening to more presentations from the other projects and saying goodbye to our HMC counterparts. This weekend has made us eager to start our journey to Malta!