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Protei-005

Protei-005's aim is to have the control on-board, no more remote controlling like 002, 003, the machine should sense its environment and make the decision where to go next.

The test did not go so well, but we've learnt a lot on the way :
- the basic electronics (diagrams and pictures coming up soon on the http://protei.org) is pretty good, worked out of the water and provides a good extendable basis for future developments.
- improved miniaturization
- simpler shape are easier to compute and evaluate (drag + turbulences) so that's also quite a good thing for simple dynamic engineering
BUT
the many cool things about Protei-005 is that we start to sketch a model for evaluation :) So, we have
- wind sensor (direction + power) made from a Wiimote Nunchuck
- accelerometers on board, vibration sensors
- Xbee to send the information in real-time to a logging computer

We have a controlled environment so we can simulate wind, at the speed we like to. Hopefully next version we can do also waves and currents... :)
And even better, we have a webcam above the whole setting capturing the boat movement. So we have with Protei-005, not only a semi-autonomous machine but also a good indoor evaluation setup. Eventhough the test wasn't impressive (not bad for 3 days of work on a robot though), we have a lot of new infos. So in the close future, it is not only about the machine but it is about :

* Machine (with sensors onboard + realtime communication)

* Controlled environment

* Software analyzing behavior :)

And we need to urgently work on the documentation on the website and publishing the specs (sorry!), and eventually a step by step for each protei up-to-date... Also the fact that Protei is a collaboration of Open_Sailing & randomwalks, needs to be way clearer, so much work to do... :)

Some pictures

mechanics