• The ERA team has fallen into an easy routine for the mornings. First place the ramps and lower Boudreaux out of the van. Then move out the science trailer and put it under the tarp. Assemble the antenna mast. Restore power and ethernet into the van. Connect fresh batteries for the base. Boot all the laptops and distribute code fresh from the late night code banging. Test the network connectivity. Bring up the robot's servers. Participate in the 9am tag up.
  
  
• After the morning routine, the ERA team was seemingly prepared for a good day of robotics. As the 11am scheduled start time for the Sol 2 EVA came near and all the teams spun up for the event, Boudreaux decided to act up and cause trouble. The electronics that control the drive motors (the "pic box") were not talking to the software.
  
  
• Jeff negotiated with Ron and Maarten to delay the testing a bit. The weather granted us an additional reprieve by threatening rain.
  
  
• Rob and Nathan worked hard to troubleshoot and fix the pic box, uncovering a condition that has long existed but only now revealed itself: the metal shield common on rs-232 serial cables causes the rs232-rs422 converter card to fail when that shield comes in electrical contact with the metal box housing all the pics. The cause is still being investigated, but after 2 hours Rob and Nathan had it fixed. Boudreaux was ready for the Sol 2 with no time to spare.
  
  We also discovered that once the pics get into this bad mode the only way to recover them is to cycle the power.
  
  
• The joystick is not fixed yet.
  
  
• The Sol 2 activity began about 20:10 UTC, and Boudreaux began tracking the astronaut using DGPS. The robot began showing an oscillation in its motion from side to side as it moved forward. Kim identified the cause from a simple change made yesterday (one that allowed Boudreaux to move faster during obstacle avoidance).
  
  Jeff and Kim decided to abort the track, made a change in the XML configuration file to prevent the oscillation, and restarted the affected servers. The improvement was immediately obvious by the smoothed ground track everyone was watching in HabCom.
  
  
• Subsequently, several minor software and hardware upsets were encountered.
  firewire camera failures - 3
  mapServer aborts/anomalies - 2 or 3
  biclops pan-tilt unit - 1
  battery "near-failures" - 1
  
  
• Overall, Boudreaux achieved it's goals. Specifically:
  
  • astro-geologists appeared pleased with the utility of the science trailer and having Boudreaux autonomously stay near them.
  • See the attached "image16.jpg" for a picture from Boudreaux's perspective as the astro-geologists are using the science trailer
  • Boudreaux successfully followed the astro-geologists around as they went about their work, using obstacle avoidance, path planning, and tracking with DGPS.
  
  
  
• The ERA team looks forward to the feedback from the astro-geologists for improving the human-robot interaction.
  
  
• Several planned Sol2 robot capabilities were not tested at all:
  
  • no curation label printed (command never received from Brahms)
  • no "watch" command from Brahms (Jeff successfully initiated one) See the image "image10.jpg" snapped as the pan-tilt unit was actively servoing to keep the Astronaut in it's frame.
  • no "stop" command from Brahms to stop tracking (Kim manually sent)
  
  
  
• The fix Rob made to the panorama Server (incorrect cardinal direction indicators in image) was verified during the run. See the atteched image.
  
  
• Statistics for the day (unfortunately not begun until Waypoint4... so actual times and distances are greater):

Agent Name	Distance Traveled (meters)	Duration (hours)
Boudreaux	1017.2	2.748
AstroOne (Brent)	2745.45	2.757
AstroTwo (Abby)	1983.01	2.745

Boudreaux's run today was 100% autonomous without any manual intervention.