Rollercoaster of ICEX Deployments

I felt today was just like many other days of ICEX. We plan some goals for a deployment, then when we deploy several and things go wrong. Yet later we find that the deployment was not so bad.

Today we returned to Elmo Bay in Valletta to test the sonar again. We had hoped to resolve the problems we had encountered yesterday: black sonar images with no data and no low frequency data. During the deployment we ran several missions. Every time we run a mission we can only look at a couple of the many sonar files because it takes a while to copy and process the sonar data. While we were at the deployment all the sonar images we looked at had the same black problem and the low frequency still seemed like it showed no data. At 12:30 we had not accomplished the sonar testing goals we had set for today and were hungry so we carried the robot to a cafe in Valletta for lunch.

Carrying the Iver to a cafe in Valletta

After a great lunch at Eddies Cafe Chris wanted us to gather some of the examples of problems we were having with the sonar data so he could send an email to Edge Tech asking for help. When gathering these images we looked all of the sonar images of the last run because we had time to wait for them to transfer and process. It turns out we had just chosen poor images to look at before and several of the images showed promising data. Furthermore, the low frequency scans did seem to have data it was just too dim to in the sun at the deployment. Timmy looked over these images and thought they were not so bad as we originally thought.

With the good news of the deployment we explored some of Valletta and got to see a ceremonial cannon firing.