Battery Life (Normal Use)
~1 hour w/ 10Ah battery ($60 each)
Battery Life (Light Use)
~4 hours w/ 10Ah battery ($60 each)
What do you mean by Normal Use and Light Use ? Can I add additional batteries to gain more hours ?
I have one of the first BlueROV2 kits and have flown it a few times in “real world conditions” in the field. Rusty and his team have a lot more experience flying the BlueROV2 than I and their experience may differ from mine.
I would estimate that you would get at least 2 to 4 hours of what I would consider “normal use” from a single 10Ah battery. That’s based on setting the thruster gain to its lowest setting, operating in relatively shallow water (to 20 feet depth) and currents less than 1 knot. Why the lowest setting? Quite honestly, the BlueROV2 has a ton of power and unless you’re flying in a strong current or to great depths, I don’t think you’ll need that much more thruster gain. I also tend to fly the ROV with a “light touch” because I often record a video of the mission and want to keep the quality as high as possible. The BlueROV2’s stability is excellent for this.
You might be able to fit a larger battery in the housing, there’s some wasted space that could be filled with a custom battery design. But there’s also nothing to prevent you from adding more battery housings with more batteries if you wanted. I’ve got a design I’ve been working on for a “skid” that mounts to the bottom of the ROV and contains a sonar transducer and 2 additional batteries. That would give me 3 times the battery power of the current ROV and a convenient location for the sonar.
Thank you very much!
Hi ooyama,
We tested these numbers experimentally. I don’t have the exact profile information in front of me right now, but the testing profiles were roughly this:
Light Use: Depth hold on, no current, hard maneuvering every 15 minutes for 1 minute.
Heavy Use: Full power descent for 5 minutes, then depth hold on, simulated constant 0.5 m/s current, hard maneuvering for 5 minutes every 15 minutes
-Rusty
Rusty,
Is it possible to run 2 of those 10Ah batteries in parallel to double the run time?
If so, is there enough space/ballast for the additional battery and would you need just a y connector, or some other mods to make that work?
-Tony
Tony,
Yes, definitely. You can’t fit two in the standard battery enclosure so you need another tube. You just need a Y connector to mount them in parallel.
Just so you know, we’re working on an alternate battery option to fit in the current tube that will nearly double the battery capacity. We’ll hopefully have that available in 2 months or so.
-Rusty