SONIA 2006: Operation with one damaged depth thruster

In 2006, SONIA was just starting to use Seabotix SBT150 thrusters for the first time. We had little experience with them, but had a killer drive circuit for the LIN Bus designed by Jean-Pierre Marcotte. They were the direct ancestors of our current CAN design.

The day of the qualification run, our front depth thruster had a leak because we had kinked the O-Ring during assembly and had not done pressure checking. We had to do the qualification run with only one depth thruster because we did not have time to fix it prior to our time slot.

As it turns out, our symetrical controller design and highly dampened dynamics saved the day :) See for yourself what our controllers did to compensate ! We finished 3rd that year, and yes, we managed to do gate-pinger in the qualification run with a sub that was never designed to work with a single depth thruster.

Lesson learned: 1) KISS design pays off, 2) Luck pays off, 3) You cannot predict what a dynamic system will do outside its nominal configuration.

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