Video from 5 boat deployment

Here are a few choice videos of the 5 boat team autonomously taking water measurements on the Doha Corniche.

The day started out with very calm water, making for some interesting ripple patterns as the boats began their lawnmower pattern paths.

Towards the end of the morning the waves started to get a bit choppy, but the boats had no complaints handling it.

Here is a short clip from the GoPro that gives some first person perspective on what the waves are like out there.

This work was performed under a grant from the Qatar National Research Fund program. 

Murphy's Law Relents for Just One Day

After two months where it seemed everything that could go wrong did go wrong, Murphy's Law relented for just one day and we managed to get five boats simultaneously sensing in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. 

Our setup footprint and setup time has steadily decreased over the course of our stay in Doha, due to many factors:

• Rental of a SUV so equipment does not have to be unloaded every night
• Boxes to compactly store and safely transport the shrouds and magic plates
• Purchase of a smaller antenna
• Success in finding a deep cycle battery and inverter for power

Below is a picture of the reduced set of supplies we unload at the Corniche each morning.

The weather looked very promising this morning: small waves headed directly toward the shore, making for easy robot retrieval in the event of a failure resulting in loss of control. We got to work setting things up and soon were pushing boats into the water:

After a couple phone reboots, we had all 5 boats running happily in the water and got to sit back, relax, and take pictures. Here are some much anticipated photos of a 5 boat deployment!