Status (5/26/2001)

(5/26/2001)

We built the vehicle up over the week and got everything to work with some success on the vehicle. However, when we tested the vehicle's movement under the new load we found that it was unable to turn right or left and was a little sluggish moving forward and aft. As a result, we have spend the last couple of days rebuilting the mounts for the tank so that they are lighter and the majority of the weight is centered at the turret. 

To date, most of the mounts have been built, but three of the six sonars are giving inaccurate data and the accelerometer is not functioning properly. We are trying to get them back before we finish mounting everything and test the vehicle again. 

Besides decreasing the weight of the vehicle, we have also worked on improving our equipment. We have partially implemented a serial controller on the FPGA to reduce some of the errors that we were getting on the display. The data has become more stable than it was and we are planning to finish building the serial controller to further eliminate problems that we are having in the system. The only area that we feel we may not be able to adequately test is the autonomous controller. This is due to the fact that the vehicle needs to be nearly finished to test the algorithms and we are getting down to the wire for completion.

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