Locking the BlueROV's depth at 1 metre so that a student operating it doesn't accidentally slam it to the pool's bottom

General Discussion
1

Hello everyone. Is there a way to “child-lock” the depth of BlueROV to 1 metre so that children controlling the BlueROV wouldn’t be able to make it dive beyond a depth of 1 metre? Is this possible in qgroundcontrol? I’m not talking about “depth-hold” Mode. I dont want children or students to be capable of accidentally hitting the ROV down to the bottom of the pool while making it dive or descend.

2

Hi @rai,

This isn’t a feature that’s built in to the ArduSub firmware (running on the flight controller) or QGroundControl.

  1. The easiest way I can think of to achieve a “maximum safe depth” would be to use a Pymavlink script to monitor the depth and disarm the vehicle if it goes too deep.
  2. It’s technically possible to write a more complex program that overrides the control instead, but that requires proxying all the communications, which may have performance challenges.
  3. It would also be possible to make a modified version of ArduSub that refuses to do downward motor outputs when below a certain depth, which would perhaps be the most pleasant user experience, but that requires modifying and building ArduSub, which takes a fair amount of setup.
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3

Hi @rai
I can think of two more non technical solutions.
Make a “bumper frame” of the ROV; elastcs like rubber that dampens hitting things:

or
Tie a big float on the tehter about 1 meter from the ROV.
A maybee boring solution, but that will stopping depth over 1 meter, but still possible to tow the buoy around the pool with the ROV

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