Setup day today. Result : we have a working rover! The day started with lots of driving, all over the island of Tenerife, going from one end to the other to pick up support equipment. The van will be used to carry Bridget around, a remote control centre while testing and as a workshop in the evenings when we will be making repairs and/or preparing Bridget for the next day's testing. We picked Bridget up from the Tenerife South airport and finally, a motorised wheel barrow that we've dubbed 'The Mole' in honour of the Mole in Thunderbirds. We will use the Mole to take Bridget out of the van and move her to each test location in the field. Antonio, head of the local ElectroSat satellite installation company, came to install a satellite dish at the hotel so we would have an internet connection for uploading and downloading image data.
[Note : The photos below can also be viewed on this PicasaWeb Link.]
Selection of pictures of the day: picking up the Mole, getting Bridget from the airport and assembling her.
After a quick lunch it was back to work again. Lester, Andy and Martin spent the entire afternoon putting Bridget back together and unpacking the support gear. I was in the PRoVisG meeting room, trying to set up the live feeds and webcams - that's where I am now, reporting on the events of the day. Part of the PRoVisG team are already here: - Laurence Tyler and Steve Pugh, from the University of Aberystwyth with their PanCam and Hans-Rudolph Graf, from CSEM in Switzerland who has bought the Omniview and Time-Of-Flight (TOF) cameras. Bridget has been checked out and is running well. That's it. We are ready. Tomorrow is our first day in the field field where we do our first dry run. We'll have walkie-talkies for communicating with one another and will be keeping logbooks of everything that happens. This is all very different from the design tasks that we generally do back in the office. This is operations, following procedures, being slow but steady - it requires discipline. This is flying an entire team and a rover with lots of support gear to a National Park in another country, and doing field trials. Or getting ready for them.
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