BlueROV Heavy Axes Mapping in Cockpit do not command ROV as expected

Blue Robotics Software
,
1

Hi,

We have a BlueROV Heavy configuration vehicle. We recently re-installed BlueOS, and made the move over to Cockpit. We are using Cockpit in the desktop environment, version 1.17.0.

We put our ROV in a test tank today, and found that the joystick commands for the Axes listed in cockpit (Axis X, Y, R and Z) don’t result in the vehicle moving in the expected directions. When we look at the joystick configuration in Cockpit while the vehicle is unarmed, it does appear to show that when we press the thumb stick ‘Forward’ on our controller, the values of Axis Y change as expected, and the thumb stick that we wish to use for for ‘Lateral’ does seem to change the values for Axis X, and then rotation maps to Axis R, and ‘dive/surface’ to Axis Z - all as expected.

However, we arm the vehicle we find that pushing the thumb stick forward to command the ROV to dive instead causes it to action a pitch control function (meaning two forward most vertical thrusters push water up towards the surface, and the two rear most vertical thrusters push water towards the bottom of of the tank, or vice versa). The other axes also don’t seem to command the expect functions - ‘Forward’ on the thumb stick cause the vehicle to lateral, and the ‘lateral’ thumb stick causes the ROV to turn.

On a whim , we changed the mapping for Axis Z to Axis S instead, to see if this would rectify the situation - this does cause the vehicle to dive properly, with all four vertical thruster pushing in the same direction, but it does not seem like a feasible work around because it appears that Axis S and Axis Z are scaled differently and the default ‘resting’ (or deadband?) value of 500 for Axis Z seems to cause the ROV to dive at full power when mapped to Axis S instead (as soon as we arm the ROV, it dives like crazy when the dive function is mapped to Axis S).

Things we have tried so far:

  1. Swapping controllers - no change
  2. Going back to QGroundControl - this seems to cause the ‘Yaw’ and ‘lateral’ commands to work as expected, but we still cannot command forward motion and a ‘dive’ command in QGC still cause the pitch adjustment type motion described above.
  3. Rebooted cockpit, and rebooted the ROV - no change
  4. Checked propeller CW vs CCW installation - I believe these are all correct.

We plan to re-check our motor directions tommorow to see if we need to reverse any motors.

Are there any other suggestions of what we should try? I can also confirm that all 8 thrusters turn in air when testing Vehicle Parmeters in BlueOS, and the motor mappings in BlueOS align to the correct thrusters on the ROV in the real world.

Suspect we may be missing something obvious, but not sure what exactly. We are running ArduSub 4.5.7 (Stable), BlueOS 1.4.2 and Cockpit Desktop 1.17.0 on a Windows PC.

Thanks,

Ben

3

Hi @bsnow,

The behaviour you’ve described could all be because of incorrect motor direction configuration, so I suspect and am hopeful that this will fix your issue :slight_smile:

If you switch to stabilize or depth hold mode your vehicle will likely currently go out of control for the same reason.

Per ArduSub’s Pilot Control docs, Axis Z is a special case:

4

Hi @bsnow -

What mode are you in when operating with the unexpected pitching? If Acro mode, this is expected behavior - what happens in stabilize mode?

Can you share a screenshot of the table view of your game controller in Cockpit, at the top where axis are defined?

Updating to the latest stable, BlueOS 1.4.3, is not likely to fix this but is recommended all the same…

5

Hi @tony-white , @EliotBR

Had to set this aside for a few days, but circled back to it recently. Turns out it was a incorrect motor direction issue. We reconfirmed all motor directions in BlueOS and it is working fine now. Thanks again for the support!

Ben