Following up, we have apparently done some testing with a single control station computer controlling 4 BlueBoats through 1 BaseStation. I don’t believe we’ve tested beyond that (e.g. to find a specific failure threshold).
Note that connecting multiple BlueBoats does require configuring them to each
In terms of control/interfacing,
For limiting factors:
- Every boat needs to be within range of the BaseStation to be controlled
- This depends on the antenna setup, both in terms of sensitivity and occlusions
- In future one could envisage a substantial range increase for a fleet through some kind of mesh networking (likely at the expense of some additional latency)
- It is also possible to bypass the BaseStation with some form of internet-based control (e.g. using a cellular modem or Starlink setup), although that does understandably add some cost and latency
- The connection data rates may overload the BaseStation capabilities
- This would likely take many vehicles for normal control communication, but could happen with fewer if they’re sending additional network traffic (e.g. sonar/video data)