PacX challenge data

Fontaine Maru is not in Sunnyvale

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:42:42 -0400

Only its brain is :-) we swapped out the command-and-control unit and shipped it back to Sunnyvale. Fontaine is happily in Hawaii running with a transplanted brain. The old brain is being worked on in Sunnyvale. The software generating the data that goes into ERDDAP currently doesn’t track changes in vehicle ID numbers (we currently use the IMEI number from the Iridium modem). Yet another thing on my to-do list :-)

What is the GPS update rate for the gliders? Does it vary or do you keep a steady schedule? What do you use to monitor the weather patterns that the gliders may encounter? Is the speed data that you get from the gilders an average or an instantaneous speed? The data is great, keep it up!

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:35:13 -0400

The GPS sensor updates every 5 seconds, but we only send back GPS coordinates every 5 minutes, this can be reduced if we’re trying to conserve power or increased if we want to track the gliders more closely.

We use satellite data to monitor weather patterns but this generally doesn’t affect our course since we want to test the vehicles’ abilities in a variety of sea-states and weather conditions.

The speed data is a one minute average and the latest value is reported.

Glad you’re enjoying the data! Have you considered using your research and analysis to enter the PacX Challenge Prize for six months of free Wave Glider time and a $50k sponsorship from BP?

-DM

Windows App for Tracking PacX Data

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:18:28 -0400

As I mentioned earlier, a super fan of ours created an HP Touchpad app for the PacX data, after a few weeks of working on it he successfully ported it over to Windows! Go ahead and visit his website to check it out for yourself.

I heard about this via and article my Mom sent me from the WSJ. I teach Oceanography for the University of Phoenix and formerly I was an Oceanographer for the Navy. I am SO excited about this experiment. I live in Guam so if you or your team ever find the need to come this way please let me know I'd be happy to be the local on the ground to help you out. .... do you have a fan page on Facebook? I'd like to share this with my friends and share the info on the Navy METOC FB page!

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:34:42 -0400

We’re really pleased that you’re excited. One of the points of the whole exercise is to get students everywhere excited by the ocean. Good dense data, freely available, and a (slow) race with sharks. Even without the fancy instruments, students can find all sorts of interesting facts about ocean currents.

On twitter we’re @liquidrinc. Our Facebook page is liquid robotics. And we’re on LinkedIn. They don’t get updated as often as they ought to. This blog gets the most attention.

When looking on your screenshot of your Robot Visualizer, we can see "Papa Mau", the missing glider, not far from "Piccard Maru" with a date 8 March (after the end of data available from iridium). Is that meaning you are able to continue to follow the "Papa Mau" glider with GPS data and no iridium emission ? How did you collect data ? Did you plan to rescue also this glider ?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:11:00 -0400

[ I apologize for this and the following entries being somewhat out of order, I’m just catching up on a backlog of questions ] Iridium Inc “reprovisioned” the modem unexpectedly, which mucked up the packet format. We figured out what was wrong and the modern software (the visualizer) knows how to compensate for the mess-up. The infrastructure currently feeding ERDDAP doesn’t have this fix (yet). For various reasons we could receive but not send :-( so it was blindly following it’s original instructions which didn’t compensate for high currents east of Hawaii. It wasn’t able to overpower the currents, so it got pushed towards Maui, where we had to pick it up.

What's happening for the Piccard Maru Wave Glider ? Since the 5th of March, the ruddercount seems locked, the glider goes to North even with a desired heading is South and Pressure Sensor , Submarine Temperature and Heading are 0 !!! Something is broken ?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:06:56 -0400

Shark attack :-)

For the "PowerStatus" dataset, there is a strange thing about "Solar1" & "Solar2" (milliwatts) since the 2012-02-11. A couple of values are negative and lower than -32000 during the daylight (ex: Fontaine Maru @ 2012-02-11T21:51:42Z Solar1=12917.0, @ 2012-02-11T22:51:42Z Solar1=-32009.0 and @2012-02-11T23:51:36Z Solar1=28216.0). When looking the variation, it seems that there is a bad conversion into signed integer instead of unsigned integer (-32009.0 means 33527.0 mW => Two's complement).

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:06:37 -0400

yes: my bad. I’m still working on pushing out regenerated data with some calibration problems fixed. It’s taking a while since the back end is being almost completely rewritten :-(

I got a question about the type of shark that attacked Picard:...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:28:57 -0400

I got a question about the type of shark that attacked Picard: the answer is that we don’t know (yet). The tooth fragment is off being analyzed by experts. As you can see from the chart above, it isn’t clearly obvious which of the candidate species it was. The fragment is pretty small.

Piccard versus the sea monster: if you’ve been reading...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:36:44 -0400

Glider got some rather amazing scratches

Wing cratches. No real damage yet

A tooth got left behind! (center)

The only real damage: chomped cable

Piccard versus the sea monster: if you’ve been reading along with this blog you’ll remember that a while ago we lost control of the waveglider named Piccard. Telemetry and almost all systems were just fine. We had lost control of the rudder, so Piccard was drifting. We had all kinds of theories about what had happened. Fortunately, this happened reasonably close to Hawaii, so we were able to go out and pick it up. But once we did, the cause was amazing: it had been seriously savaged by a major shark. The body of the glider sustained no real damage. Some wicked-looking scratches, but that’s all they were. We found a fragment of a tooth lodged in a seam, still no real damage. It took an impressive beating and nothing mechanical broke. Even the rudder module was in fine shape and totally usable. But the one exposed cable got a mighty chomp, and that’s all it took. It’s the only real shark damage we’ve ever had, despite many years in Hawaiian waters.

Wave Gliders ready for some Aloha

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:09:01 -0400

All four Wave Gliders have now reached Hawaii and broke the world record! Some made it in a more exciting fashion than others, so it’s time for them to get a little spa treatment while in Hawaii.

Fontaine and Benjamin arrived under their own steam at our test area off the Big Island near Kona, and Ben was greeted with some fanfare from the local press.

Piccard Maru got pretty close but ran into a bit of a steering issue that we’re still diagnosing. We sent the Noha Loa to visit it, and it’s back to shore now.

Papa Mau got in a funny state with its communications after Iridium accidentally reconfigured the data feed. Our coders were able to hand-build a command and regain communications, but we were awfully close to Maui so we opted to meet it with a boat.

It looks like all the gliders took a bit of a beating from the very rough winter weather (a tornado touched down in Oahu this week, if you haven’t heard.) Despite all the problems, all four Wave Gliders have made it to the Aloha State where we’re getting ready to send them to Japan and Australia after a bit of R&R!

PacX HP Touchpad App

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:44:23 -0400

Easily one of the coolest parts about projects where you open your data to the internet, like the PacX challenge, is seeing what the community comes up with. So we’re proud to promote one of the first PacX apps (that I’ve seen) built outside of Liquid Robotics.

The app was created by Polar Jack Software, an independent developer in France. He is easily our biggest fan as sometimes it seems he monitors our Wave Gliders more closely than us. The app is for the HP Touchpad, so only about a million people in the whole world can even download it, but never the less, there’s an app for that!

You can download the app from the HP App Catalog and Polar Jack Software also has a product page for the App. Below are some screen shots from the app.

Thanks to Polar Jack for being such a huge fan! I hope people out there enjoy his app and make some discoveries with it! You can reach out to Polar Jack on twitter using @PolarJackSW.

I’m sure there is something interesting in the data we have not yet found. If you find anything, make an app, or do anything with the PacX data you would like us to see or mention, you can reach us through our tumblr blog or on twitter @liquidrinc.

Fontaine arrived at our engineering site on the Big Island...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:49:00 -0500

Fontaine arrived at our engineering site on the Big Island yesterday and is now station-keeping just offshore. Benjamin is almost there. Papa Mau - the one whose Iridium link got messed with is getting closer. The currents were pretty fierce and he got knocked about pretty badly. Piccard Mau is “at the mercy of the sea”, having lost control of its rudder. We’ll be heading out to fix or retrieve it soon.

The graphs at the bottom show power (blue) and water temperature (red). It’s bright and sunny, so power levels are high (the lowest point on the graph is far above zero, the flat regions on the tops of the curves are when the batteries are fully charged. The water temperature is a balmy 25° C (77° F).

Where the Gliders are going ? Since 2 or 3 days, the Cap has changed for Fontaine Maru, Piccard Maru and Benjamin. There are not going to the buoy south of Hawaii through the Alenuihaha Channel between the two main islands, but it seems that there are going right to the main island.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:59:39 -0500

We always planned on sending the Wave Gliders through the Alenuihaha Channel after going to NDBC Buoy 51000 and to our test range in the North Kohala Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, so they are on the correct path.

New Game: Identify the Stowaway!

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:16:15 -0500

We regularly take pictures from the PacX Wave Gliders as you may have noticed, but something very interesting happened this time - We found a stowaway! We have no idea what this little critter is, we’re hoping you all in the internet world can help us identify it for us. Here are the pics:

We weren't alone in the storm!

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:41:21 -0500

In our previous posts we mentioned the major storm our Wave Gliders went through, and we just recently found out that we weren’t alone out there! We learned that there was a Canadian family that was rescued by a container ship in the same vicinity (~600 Miles away) as our Wave Gliders.

We’re not sure if our Wave Glider data could have helped them in this instance. Maybe we could have helped steer them in the right direction, or have told them to maintain a holding pattern until the storm passed. But what is important to note is the lack of data available when you’re in the open ocean, you’re on your own as far as knowing what conditions to expect. Currently the only sources of data are buoy’s which are few and far between, and satellite instruments (which can be seen via the S.T.A.R. website). Unfortunately there is no single place where all of this data is aggregated and easily available to the public.

Getting tubed! Here is Benjamin taking on some 8 meter waves....

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:11:00 -0500

Getting tubed! Here is Benjamin taking on some 8 meter waves. The view is looking towards the bow as it submerges through the crest of a wave. Photo taken 02/09/2012 at 1900UTC

100 Knot Winds!!

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:00:52 -0500

Up to now the Wave Gliders have not seen any horrible weather, conditions have been ideal. Starting in early February, the vehicles encountered their first significant storm. In the images below you can see wind gusts between 40 and 100 knots starting on February 5th. This is coincidental with the barometric pressure dropping below 1000 mb for Papa Mau and approaching 980 for Piccard Maru. A pressure that low is comparable to pressures at the center of a hurricane! The wave heights associated with this storm were near 8 meters!

When computing the solar position corresponding to "Benjamin venturing west Sunday morning, January 29, 2012 at 16:18z", it seems that the sun is under the horizon (Zenith Distance: 93.18°, Azimuth: 114.56°). Is it really the correct time of the picture ?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:26:16 -0500

What latitude and longitude did you use in your calculation? You stated the azimuth but what was the resulting altitude of the sun?

When a wave spectra is calculated, isn't a response amplitude operator utilized? Where does the Datawell sensor get this information? Or has Liquid Robotics estimated this statistic using a combination of wave tank testing and computer simulations?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:20:38 -0500

The filter response of the instrument is determined ahead of time. In addition, there is of course the hydrodynamic response of the glider with its length and width in relation to the wave length. This was examined when the glider travelled a square trajectory, The resulting spectra showed only little differences due to slowly changing wave conditions, rather than hydrodynamic response issues.

Hi - just started looking at this so forgive me if this has been asked before. There is now a considerable spread in positions between the 4 vehicles of 200+ miles. Any thoughts on why?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:52:41 -0500

If we consider the 4 wave gliders as physically identical, the only explanation for the current spread in position is local oceanographic and meteorological conditions.