First Day of Field Operations 2009

Today was our first day in the water after installing the new flotation sphere (and a few other components) into the vehicle. The goal for the day was to properly trim the vehicle -- get its weight and buoyancy evenly distributed fore and aft, port and starboard. Our secondary goal was to get comfortable with the process of deploying: loading and unloading the truck, bringing the appropriate equipment, and so on.

In this picture, we've just finished unloading Odyssey IV from the back of the rented box truck (using the lift gate) and are assembling it next to the pier.


The Gloucester Maritime Heritage Center is a great place for us to test, because of their easily-accessible crane that is poised over water deep enough to hold the vehicle.


Only the height of the hook is controlled, so we have to use a lot of ropes to keep the arm of the crane pointed in the right direction and the vehicle from spinning.


After a few trips into and out of the water, we got the right mix of weight and buoyancy in the front and back. Time to haul it out of the water one last time and put all the buoyancy in the inside. The sun even came out!


We put the vehicle on a tether and did some joystick-controlled thruster tests. Manual control for this vehicle is done on the equivalent of a USB Playstation controller, although the available commands don't translate perfectly to the analog joysticks on it.


The thrusters are powerful enough to make visible effects on the surface of the water, and to tow the Boston Whaler that we were using as a chase boat.