With four major projects on the go — two of them which have been recently designed by new members — it can be said that ARISE has been very active in the last few months. The motivated members are working hard to attend their upcoming competitions during the summer of 2011.
The original ARISE project, the AUV – Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, which aims to compete in San Diego in July 2011, now has a completely new electronics case that was fabricated by Pronox, their industrial partner which operates a machine shop in the Ottawa region. The flexibility of the case allows programmers and electrical engineering students to reconfigure the hardware to test out different systems while its modularity allows the mechanical students to reuse it in other vehicles.
In fact, as a spin-off of the autonomous submarine, an autonomous boat is being built, which aims to compete in Virginia Beach in June 2011. Due to the extent the two competitions similarity to each other, both vehicles are being designed and built by the same team to maximize the quantity of work that can be reused and applied to both challenges.
Many tests for the boat have already been performed. Controlling the boat through wireless Internet is quite fun! Control systems and simple machine vision have already implemented and development is advancing quickly.
Another spin-off of the autonomous submarine is a project to build an Internet-controlled submarine with the intent of it being commercialized: the Internet-controlled vehicle will be used as a tool to inspect hydro-electric power stations. Currently, dam inspection is done manually which is expensive and dangerous. This project, with an important grant by the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), will improve on the autonomous submarine to produce a vehicle that can inspect the dams for cracks and the penstocks for debris.
Intéressé en aviation et en vol autonome? Le groupe mené par Jean-Philippe Perron vous intéressera. Leur équipe travaille sur l’intégration et le développement d’un auto-pilote pour assister les pompiers à surveiller et à combattre les feux de foret. Ils ont récemment fait l’acquisition de lunettes vidéo,qui seront utilisés lors du contrôle à distance.
Les membres veulent aussi souligner leur implications dans la communauté. Lors du 9 novembre, le groupe de robotique a présenté leurs projets à des jeunes de 11e et 12e année lors d’une journée spéciale au musée des sciences et de la technologie du Canada. Les jeunes (et quelques adultes aussi) ont bien aimés contrôler le bateau dans une piscine de 400 litres installé pour l’occasion. Il a pu être remarqué avec amusement que le système de reconnaissance visuel contrôlant le robot suivait plus que la bouée orange, mais aussi les personnes habillés de couleur vive. Quel niveau d’avancement technologique quand même!
Si vous voulez plus d’information sur ARISE ou voulez vous joindre à nos projets, visitez notre site web www.ariselab.ca ou venez nous voir au SITE 3041!
For more information about ARISE or would like to join our projects, visit our website www.ariselab.ca or come see us in SITE 3041!