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Log Book for May 6, 2004
EVA Robotic Assistant Report
Crew 29 Reporting

The plan for today is to retry "Segment 1" of the Lith Canyon scenario.
  • The ERA team deployed to Lith early to test the newest tweaks in the path planning code by practicing Segment 1.
  • Discussion between Kim and Jeff resulted in the desire to rewrite the path planner, perhaps offer multiple path planners that would compete for use, and to age map data to reduce path planner error when humans (or dust) appear as obstacles to the robot's sensors (e.g., the laser).
  • After an injury in the field to someone else, the ERA team noted the lack of a first aide kit.
  • Rob worked on improving the battery monitor software to deal with both apm (older power management in Linux kernel) and acpi (newer Linux kernels).
  • Nathan played the role of RoboChase again today, keeping a close eye on Boudreaux during the traverses, replacing it's batteries, and troubleshooting hardware issues real-time.
  • Nathan discovered one power connector to a gps correction radio is the wrong size and may be contributing to issues.
  • Rob was interviewed by a Latin reporter, and managed to converse in Spanish. Rob also helped Boudreaux with his own interview today, also done in Spanish. Boudreaux is trilingual!
  • Jeff worked on the next-version executor, designing to resolve issues in the current version concerning aynchronous commands and thread-per-request.
  • Jeff parameterized and generalized more base-specific values in the base drive server.
  • Kim changed several values used by the path planner to evaluate arcs, particularly dealing with backwards motion.
  • Today's run started at 23:32 UTC (5:30pm local time) and ended at 00:57 UTC.
  • Several upsets occurred during the run today
    • the poseServer died once for unknown reasons
    • the pic hardware became unresponsive one time and required a power cycle to fix
    • gps onboard boudreaux went bad due to a blown fuse
  • The following objectives were successfully achieved today:
    • multiple "take image" commands
    • multiple "take panorama" commands
    • multiple "watch astronaut" commands
    • multiple "stop" commands
    • multiple "report position" commands
    • multiple "define position" commands
  • The following objectives were not successful today:
    • move to waypoint
    • report traverse map
    • report elevation map
  • The total times and distances traveled by the 3 agents today were:
    • Boudreaux, 100.259 minutes, 15.083m
    • AstroOne, 97.471 minutes, 77.863m
    • AstroTwo, 97.571 minutes, 80.082m

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