Hi, everybody! This is the 1st of many upcoming posts on our blog. During this initial week of work, we made some progress on the software part of our prototype - most importantly, we set up the communication between the transmitter and the receiver and solved some issues that came up. Another important event that happened was a meeting with a research engineer working at a group focused in underwater autonomous operations, with whom we discussed the possibility of a collaboration. We also went over our ideas for the prototype, to which the interviewee gave some opinions and even some critical suggestions.
Welcome to our blog, everybody! Here, we will regularly be giving updates about our progress. Stay tuned!
With the beginning of the semester, we began some of the more serious activities of the project. First of all, and most importantly, we immediately began working on the software component of our project.
Using materials previously owned by the team which seemed enough to set us on our way (namely, a couple of sensors and some infrared receptors), we began by writing a program made to send and receive information using OOK (on-off keying). There was an immediate setback - the circuit worked at very low frequencies (about 5 Hz), but the communication between the parts stopped as soon as we started increasing the tests’ value, even while still remaining at a very low frequency (about 100 Hz). This problem was caused because, since the integrated circuit had a processor with a RISC ISA, the large amount of instructions needed to perform simple operations meant that the task loop written simply took too much time, leading to a mismatch between the duration of the processes regarding each of the emitter and the receptor components. In order to fix this issue, we looked at the processor’s clock speed and tweaked the frequency that governed the communication loop, solving the problem and eventually managing to obtain a transmission rate of about 1 Kbps!
Lastly, this Friday we had the pleasure of meeting with an investigator working in autonomous systems underwater.
Given the fact that our project has an aquatic component, we initially met with said interviewee to discuss the possibility of using their group’s facilities (namely, their large water tank) to perform some of the underwater tests with our product, request to which they obliged, while also asking questions about the validity of our ideas and the applicability of our implementation. While we initially thought of having the device strapped to the divers’ wrist, the investigator suggested that we instead have it placed in the user’s head, with the possibility of using multiple receptors. Our initial concept meant that the user would have to point their wrist towards their partner, whereas this idea made the whole process simpler; the diver would merely have to look to their partner, making not only the communication part easier, but also freeing up the user’s hands and increasing efficiency in the process.
Another suggestion was expanding our project to the development of underwater autonomous vehicles, given their increasing value in an ever more self-governing world. More specifically, the researcher turned our attention to several of the problems faced by the industry, such as the lack of underwater positioning systems, the existing difficulty in the synchronization of several vehicles operating in a parallel manner and the possibility of building a docking station for these vehicles.
The meeting proved worthwhile, and we look forward to working with the interviewee as well as with their research group.
As you have read, we’ve had quite the week! We already have a lot on our hands and look to the coming weeks and months with a lot of excitement. Thank you for reading and we’ll see you on our next post!
The meeting was conducted by team members Ricardo Rodrigues, Afonso Frazão and Rodrigo Quina.