Ideas for creating and developing a new complex vehicle

Blue Robotics Software ArduSub
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Hello everyone!! I’ve been working on a very complex project at the University of Zurich | UZH, which would be the development of a highly usable vehicle in various environments, primarily for rescue. We’re still developing the prototype, but initially it would have 9 propellers (or 5) and 4 wheels.

Since we’re in the initial phase, we’re looking for alternatives to gradually develop the system.

I’ve been discovering Ardupilot for a few weeks now. I’m understanding how they implement it (copter, rover, sub…). What do you think are the best ways to implement it (currently, we’ll only use two environments, such as copter + rover/copter + sub) on a single autopilot board? This is important because we have limited space in our proposed vehicle, and it will contribute to the deployment of our system over the years…

  • A firmware modification, I believe, is the most complex to make.
  • We’re considering using the copter as a base and adding some underwater flight modes, integrating them with Lua scripts, both to change the environment (mainly for water) and to toggle parameters in our new flight mode.
  • We’re also considering making the firmware change externally. We’ve seen a lot of work from @rmackay9 on this, but we don’t know if it would be reliable or if the timeframe is feasible.
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Hi @Amanda_Nog -
Welcome to the forums!
Sounds like a cool and complex project indeed. If your vehicle has a companion computer running BlueOS, and you’re using the Navigator autopilot, you could simply switch the autopilot firmware being used on the fly! It may be possible to automate this process, rather than completing manually on the Autopilot Firmware page.
Or, select an appropriate firmware, and expand functionality with lua scripts as you mention. I think ArduSub may be the easiest firmware to base that all on?

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Hi @Amanda_Nog,

Sounds good. I think the middle idea of using copter as a base and then adding extra flight modes might work best. Especially if those extra flight modes are going to be mostly manual (e.g. the pilot will remain in control of the vehicle while it’s a sub).

A lot can be done via Lua scripts these days including motor mixers and even flight modes (or the equivalent of flight modes but the core C++ stays in Guided mode).

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