Lights, Camera, Airboat!

On Friday the 13th, the team was lucky enough to play host to the Science Channel who had taken notice of the work Platypus has been doing and decided to shoot an episode of "Through the Wormhole" on Paul, Platypus and the CRW project.

The Science Channel's show "Through the Wormhole" is narrated by Morgan Freeman and has been on Air since 2010, so the team was very excited to hear the news that Platypus would get to appear in an upcoming episode in the next season. As the day came around the team went out to Panther Hollow equipped with seven working and camera ready boats to do some demonstrations. The demonstrations went well especially the testing of the fail safe in which the boats where all the boats were simultaneously called back to a single point as well as the waypoint testing where the boats were sent in a lawn mower motion. Another improvement was the Led Acid batteries that were used lasted much longer when compared to the previously used Nickel–metal hydride battery.

The day was very successful although we encountered some slight problems with a few of the boats shutting down due to overheating and having some speed issues while instructing boats to avoid obstacles.

In addition to our original boats two out of the seven were part of a newly debuted generation and model of boats that are lighter and have a different shape of hull which produces less drag and cuts through the water more efficiently. 

The team displayed the boats ability to communicate with each other in order to explore large bodies of water as well as all of the basic functions.  The team shared the information and results that had been gathered as well as explaining and the usefulness and meaning of these results so people could obtain insight into how these airboats can be utilized for many different applications. Finally after 8 Hours of filming Paul was exhausted from being interviewed and the team was exhausted from watching him being interviewed.

 

Stay tuned for more blogs soon and,

Watch out for Platypus coming to a TV screen near you next Summer!