Jack Reynolds and Dale Beswick have begun work on their senior projects. The projects are one year with about 10 hours per week of effort. Project proposal are due in two weeks, mid-project review at the end of the semester, and thesis due at the end of the year. Further information about the fourth year project is available.

Dale is interested in control of the submersibles motion with specific emphasis on inertial sensing. The first steps will be to develop some system requirements to understand what accuracies are required and what modes of sensing are appropriate. We tentatively set a goal of designing and building position and orientation sensing system by the end of the semester, and performing some autonomous proprioceptively-guided navigation by the end of the year.

Jack is interested in a computer vision with applications to autonomous control of the submersible. He will take a look at an undergraduate thesis from University of Sydney. Our initial activities will be to specify a vision system for the submersible including cameras, enclosures, lights, and video framegrabbers. We tentatively set a goal of acquiring and processing images by the end of the semester and demonstrating some autonomous vision-based behaviors by the end of the year.

Chris and David will continue to develop the computing, power, and motor control systems. Next week we will present a preliminary design.

The replacement magnets arrived from University of Sydney thanks to Paul Newman's efforts. Reassembling the motors is a bit tricky because the magnets tend to either pull the winding assembly off its bearing support or to pull the magnets down onto the enclosure (ouch, watch those fingers). Some question remains as to the attachment of the duct on the new magnet enclosure as all other thrusters appear to have the duct "glued" as well as screwed into place.

Contact information:

Jack Reynolds
email: r9405853@student.anu.edu.au
phone: 6247-8735

Dale Beswick
email: b3038573@student.anu.edu.au
phone: 6267-5397