4G communication with BlueROV2

Blue Robotics Software
1

Hi Guys,

I am new to the forum and working with bluerov2. I’m here for some answers and guidance.

The main goal is to communicate with my bluerov2 over 4G (not underwater). More precisely we have a “buoy” that is connected to the rov and I need to communicate with it over 4g.
Use-case example :
Remote ROV operation - for example, if we deploy our rov to some buoy with power (rov is powered over cable) and that big buoy is located far offshore, but needs some inspection time-to-time then it’s good to be able to use 4g.

What we have at the moment:
Bluerov2 is connected to the Fathom-X Tether and it’s connected to the computer. Works fine.

What we tried:
We took another raspberry and connected it with Fathom-X Tether Interface . The raspberry pi has a 4g modem and we can ssh/vnc viewer to communicate with raspberry but not with bluerov. The goal was to use this setup and qcroundcontrol running on rpi and previously mentioned method to connect with that setup over 4g. But qgroundcontrol is not working in raspian or other arm-based os out of the box.

I saw some posts where you can ditch the Fathom-X Tether and connect it with the router to enable wireless connection but this is range limited.

So what should we do to be able to connect to our rov over 4G?
Or how to replace/modify Fathom-X Tether to be able to connect with that over 4G.

2

Hi,

I would put a raspberry Pi on the topside (the buoy) and install something like Hamachi or zeroTier on it.
Then you will possibly need to ethernet tweaks.

Then you may need a mavproxy running in the topside to forward things over 4g (via the Hamachi/ZeroTier virtual network) and also forward the gstreamer packets to the computer on the other side of this network.

There are probably other ways. I think @patrickelectric has done this before.