First day at the Summit

After 2 hour flight in National Guard's Cargo Airplane, we finally arrived at the Summit. After a quick lunch, we went to straight to work.

After unpacking all the crates, we first decided to test out Yeti's autonomous run. Thankfully, the autonomous run was successful after tweaking the coefficients of the Proportional Integral Control in the driving logic.

Then, we decided to connect the instrument sled to Yeti to see whether Yeti is functional while towing the sled. When we connected the sled with the pipe that was used to connect GPR, we found that the turning momentum of the robot + sled was too great. When we manually controlled the robot to turn, the robot was barely turning even at the highest speed differential between the left and the right wheels. Therefore, we decided that we should shorten the distance between the sled and the robot as well as make the connection more flexible instead of using pipe and aluminum bracket.

Also, during the autonomous run, the robot sometimes restarted automatically the autonomous run after finishing the first run. This seems to be an error in the dynamic C driving code that needs to be fixed for tomorrow.

In the evening, we demonstrated the robot's autonomous run to NSF's media group and journalists from AP and popular mechanics. Then, we did interviews with them as well.