What is Robotics at Maryland?
It’s a roomful of bright eyes and eager minds. We are future engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and businesspeople. In the short term, we’re building competition robots. But in the long term, we’re building a problem solving task force composed of undergraduates, grad students, professors, and corporations in our area.
Many thanks to all our generous sponsors!
Journal Paper
The 2007 Journal Paper is now complete! Download the PDF.
Dive Log (see archive)
April 26th, 2008
Today we participated in Maryland Day, the University's primary outreach event to prospective students and the entire state. We had a table set up in the Kim Engineering Building (pictured) where we had video of our AUV playing, a simple time vs frequency demo, Tortuga I hardware, and handouts from our new effort with the Autonomous Robotic Speedway Competition. We also set up in the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility where we demonstrated our AUV in autonomous mode and allowed visitors to drive the robot manually. Both exhibits were highly attended (Approximately 70,000 people come to MD Day every year) and we had a great time interacting with the public and talking about robotics.
April 15th, 2008
Tortuga I has partially completed the pipeline following task from the 2007 course (PDF). Robots have to follow a path marked by a set of long, intermittent orange rectangles, collectively called the pipeline, on the bottom of the arena. Only a fifth of last year's teams were able to follow the pipeline and just 3 teams could track more than one consecutive piece. Tortuga successfully followed two sections of the pipeline. We were not able to attempt three or more today because of dive time constraints. See footage from the pipeline dive below.
This is the culmination of over a year of undergrad member Daniel Hakim's work on our vision code. It achieves its full potential in combination with our 6 degrees of freedom controller, written by graduate student member Joseph Gland. A simple finite state machine guides Tortuga between the pipeline sections.
April 11th, 2008
Today we had a guest lecturer, Shivang Patel, come to speak about image processing techniques and algorithms. He gave a great overview of theory with some practical experience, stories, and video to back it all up. This is one of the first events we have held like this and it was a great success. Thank you Shivang!
April 3rd, 2008
We had our second successful dive with the six degree of freedom Tortuga today. Tortuga 1 has been retrofitted with an additional pair of motor controls and thrusters. This allows us to test the six thruster configuration of the vehicle without having to wait for the other parts of the new vehicle to be finished. This also clears the way to begin testing our pipe following and bin hovering algorithms. Not many teams, including us, were very successful last year at those tasks so we are looking forward to the testing.
In the video above you see the vehicle moving sideways through the water. It is in need of a little gain tuning and thruster calibration, but the performance is currently adequate for our purposes.
March 27th, 2008
Today we have two important things to talk about: a new robotics competition we are participating in, and the competition Tortuga 2's core electronics. The Robotics @ Maryland club is holding a kickoff meeting this Thursday (March 27, 2008) in AV Williams Room 2328 at 6:30 PM. The meeting is for a new autonomous robot competition, the IEEE-RAS-DC, to be held in the DC area this summer. The competition requires teams of students to design, build, and program small autonomous vehicles to compete an outdoor course as fast as possible. If you are interested in robotics and you would like to get involved in a very active club, then this is a perfect opportunity. Please RSVP at:
all are welcome. If you wish to learn more, visit the site linked above or e-mail the competition organizer, Melanie Vida, at 
.
Along with that exciting opportunity to start on a new project, we have made progress on Tortuga 2's electronics. After working into the early morning Nick Limparis and Steve Moskovchenko finished and integrated the new balancer board with the other three new boards and the backplane. This is a culmination of months of work by the electronics team, and is large step toward getting Tortuga 2 into the water.
March 4th, 2008
Tonight Tortuga participated in its first research project. Aerospace engineering student Madeline Kirk had us outfit Tortuga with a docking apparatus that she is designing for her honors research project.
Madeline is an undergraduate who works at Space Systems Laboratory (SSL). The docking device is designed to be used on SCAMP, a six-degree-of-freedom robot operated by SSL.
The first docking attempt had some hiccups. We accidentally plugged the vehicle's Ethernet tether into a 10 Mbit network switch instead of our usual 100 Mbit switch. This decreased the responsiveness of the joystick control and the quality of the video from onboard cameras. Next, the right thruster cut out. Fearing a blown motor, we hoisted Tortuga onto the deck and inspected the misbehaving thruster. We found strands of fine fiber wound about the impeller shaft, which we think came off of our webbing straps.
After several hours of meticulously disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling all four thrusters, we started our second attempt. With a few tweaks to the joystick controls, we were able to make several successful docking runs. The docking device has a unique self-aligning design that allows the vehicle to mate with the platform even when approaching from slightly oblique angles. You can see this in the video below:
February 26, 2008
Steady progress in sonar and vision continued today. Our hydrophones picked up signals from our pinger, which is so loud that we can hear it anywhere on deck even though it is submerged several feet below the water's surface. We need to tone it down to match the intensity level from the competition's spec.
Our new hydrophones pick up clear signals in competition's 22 kHz-30 kHz pinger frequency range, though today we generated and detected ultrasound pulses up to 240 kHz and beyond. We also observed surface echoes, wall echoes, and acoustic interference patterns (probably from the Lloyd's mirror effect).
Our AUV, Tortuga I, has fully completed the red light task from last year's competition. Only a quarter of the teams completed this objective in 2007 and just 3 teams in 2006.
Above is a video from the vehicle's forward camera, played back at several times the original speed. The vehicle starts out by searching for the red light, finds it, makes contact, then surfaces to end the mission. The small blue square marks where the vehicle "thinks" the red light is.
February 21, 2008
More breakthroughs! We strung a rope across the tank and hung our blinking red light from it. By pulling the rope back and forth, we could move the red light horizontally through the water at any speed. Tortuga tracked the red light continuously by adjusting its azimuth (compass angle) and forward speed.
Also, we heard the first sounds from our pinger. We sent burst sine waves from our signal generator through a COTS power amplifier to drive the pinger. Within less than an hour of trial and error we started hearing strong, clear pings throughout the tank. We also were able to play DC101 underwater.
February 19, 2008
Today we acquired the first signal from our new hydrophones.
Media Coverage
Robotics@Maryland AUV Team covered in the Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007: It's the Super Bowl with a Science Bent: Students' creations are put to the test in an underwater robotics contest in San Diego.
Excerpt from article:
"It was time for the robotics squad from the University of Maryland to put Tortuga through its underwater paces. ‘We need to put a diagnostic on the board so we know the pressure at the surface,' said Stepan Moskovchenko, 20. Joseph Gland, 24, questioned the way the craft was descending in the practice pool.' That's not the desired angle; that's a weird, secondary, shadowed angle,' he said. 'It's trying to yaw a lot,' warned Joseph Lisee, 21, as he monitored readings on a laptop. And so it went in warm-ups for the Super Bowl of underwater robotics: the 10th annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Student Competition, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and co-hosted with the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group of manufacturers. The competition ends today. At stake is a $20,000 prize and serious bragging rights wherever students of robotics assemble."
Next Event:
No in the next 60 days.
Next Meeting:
No General Meeting in the next 14 days.
All new members should join the Yahoo! group for e-mail announcements.Next Dive:
When: Thursday May 22, 2008 12:00 AM to 12:00 AM
Where: None
Comments: None
Directions
Team meetings are held at Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility (NBRF), Building 382.
From the campus main entrance:
- Go straight at the main gate from Route 1 and follow campus drive to the traffic circle with the big "M".
- Turn right onto Regents Drive.
- Turn right onto Technology Drive. It is just past the farm on the left and the Animal Science building on your left.
- NBRF is the second building on your left. When you get to the front door, there will be a doorbell three feet to your right. Ring it and it will open after a few seconds.
You can also get directions to NBRF from Google Maps or find it on the offical UMD campus map.
