Engineering Seamen
Today, I had my first meeting with the engineers who are involved in the overreaching robotboat project. I was very impressed with their work to date, and especially with the model boat.
They have sensibly and authoritively divided the larger Roboboat project into roles, where each student has a clearly defined goal and they are focusing consistantly on integration and information sharing. I know from my own previous experience with autonomous vehicles that this is an emminently sensible approach.
Following the meeting, I was very kindly allowed the opportunity to observe the yacht sail under remote control and to even attempt (with some interference from UCD’s swans) to sail it myself. This experience has very much allowed me to properly appreciate the dynamics of the boat. The electronic engineers have done a very good job of installing the servos to control the main sheet and and rudder. In fact, that alone has solved some issues for me:
- The mainsheet is controlled by a servo motor. It has accurate stepping, and you can be sure of the length of the mainsheet once you’ve set it.
- The rudder is controlled, as expected, by a servo. It too can be set accurately, and the servo is more than strong enough to hold it in place.
The most important outcome of this meeting, and subsequent discussions with the very helpful engineers (No, I haven’t backtracked on my stance on engineers, but they may have their uses after all!) is that it became clear that there is a another student, Caoimhín O’Briain, who has been working on very similar elements to those that I was. We even had independently developed, but damn near identical, algorithms for the same problems. Great minds, and all that…
To avoid wasteful duplication of effort, we have agreed a dividing line and self-assigned tasks that suit our respective skill sets. In keeping with this, expect a post on a somewhat interesting problem quite soon. - D.N.T. (1/11/08)
I’d like to see a wiki page from yourself and Caoimhín describing the dividing line in more detail. I think this will help everyone to understand your responsibilities (especially for the supervisors).