Keep Rowing

Today's trip took us to Drammen, 6 miles north. Once again we met up with our entire team and our Marketing team was the host today. Drammen had the benefit of its beautiful river just a few steps from the campus and this is where our boat spent three hours of testing. While the river has a decent current, we found a small alcove-like structure with very little currents. This provided an excellent testing ground for sensing, driving and GPS navigation.

This trip was planned four weeks prior and the date was set. We were lucky to hit perfect weather without a cloud in sight, only a slight breeze reminding us that even if we have 20+ degrees in the sun, we’re still early spring.

We came here expecting a few passerby, but we were met with speakers shouting down the river and some hundreds of spectators, unfortunately not for us. “Drammen Rivercup” was already underway with teams of rowers going up and down, but gave us plenty of exposure regardless. “Drammens Tidende”, the local newspaper, recorded the rivercup, but came by to record our slightly shorter boat.

Overall the engineers found the day to be an overall success with multiple problems solved and yet more found. The detection of buoys are satisfactory and only navigation according to correct criterias remains to call the boat autonomous. As May and the exams are looming ahead, we are very close to attending AutoDrone properly. The result and performance in the competition however, depends on how much time we can squeeze in between the exams. We hope it won’t be too much. Next week's forecast is 3 degrees and rain, so it will be spent indoors structuring our data and solving the new problems.

Capping off the day, we didn’t drive for an hour only to have a different work station. We were somewhat pessimistic, but tried to reserve a table on this saturday with perfect weather, and got lucky once again. A table covered in pizza was in order and we could call the day a large success. Now let’s just cross our fingers for those exams…