Saturday, April 24, 2004:

• The robot team (Robert Hirsh, Nathan Howard, Dr. Kimberly Tyree and team lead Jeffrey Graham) arrived at Hanksville at 6:30pm to find it's robot shipment from JSC delivered and sitting outside the hotel. Boudreauxthe robot appeared to be peacefully gazing out at the landscape.
• Inspection uncovered a dent in a toolbox and more fearfully, a failure in Boudreaux's drive system exhibitedby a total lack of motion on the left side of its skid-steer base.
• After inspection, the team organized and install everything into the rented 15' moving van that will serve as our robot garage and office for the two weeks of field testing alongside the MDRS habitat.The van is smaller but much better organized this year: a set of three large office cabinets hold and organizevarious sized plastic bins with labels describing their contents.
• After dinner Rob and Nathan tracked down and solved the drive system failure. A connector from the control electronicsto an amp was oxidized and somewhat loose, and the wire-connector crimp was not reinforced with solder.

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Sunday, April 25, 2004

• In the early morning, the team secured the van for the rough ride down the BLM road to the MDRS habitat, arrivingwithout incident.
• Discussion among the teams resulted in a new location for parking our van this year. Consireration was given toprevailing winds, sun exposure, noise from the generators, access for MDRS servicing vehicles, and co-location with the Ames van to create an instant porch with sun and wind sheilding on either side and allowing a roof to be pitched between them, anchored to the vans.
• Nathan finished construction of the science trailer, outfitting it with a printer, tool holders, batteries.
• Rob assembled the front and rear firewire cameras to their pan-tilt units on Boudreaux.
• Kim and Jeff worked with Bill Clancey and Maarten Sierhuis to collect differential GPS waypoints in support of thefirst of two scenarios to be practiced-- "Pooh's Corner EVA". The first data products of the field test weresuccessfully collected- traverse distance, traverse duration, elevation change over time, and the GPS waypoints.
• Jeff worked on synchronizing the clocks and time zones on all the ERA computers to UTC/GMT time via an ntp serversetup in the habitat. This tight synchronization is critical for reassembling data, events, and log files from thevarious teams.
• Rob realized a problem with the pan-tilt units and discovered he had not properly built or installed it's latest software.He correcting this oversight and the biclops checked-out O.K.
• Kim discovered that Boudreaux's laser was reporting inaccurate distance data. The data itself wascomplete (correct number of data points returned) and uncorrupted (checksums correct), but the data values made nosense. The laser is the only sensor Boudreaux has for detecting obstacles and thus is absolutely essential forthe field tests. Given the late hour, the team decided to pull the laser off the robot and bring it back to the hotelfor troubleshooting after dinner. After dinner, the team realized that the laser vendor's software necessary fortroubleshooting was left back at the MDRS habitat and nothing more could be done that night. The team strategized anddecided to have a second laser delivered 2nd day UPS from Houston early Monday.
• All other hardware on Boudreaux (IMU, firewire cameras, speech synthesizer, joystick, base drive control) checked out nominally.