I’m in the early stages of developing a configurable glider and I’m looking for your insights and feedback. I’m really interested to learn more about where you think a low cost glider could be useful, and what problems it could help solve.
I’m also actively seeking out people in the marine industry to chat about the work they’re doing, the tools they use, to better understand their challenges. These conversations are a big help with planning the next revision of the prototype. If you’d like to chat please send me an email.
Im not from the maritime industry, but I began my DIY AUV jurney with thoughts about building a glider. Mainly because its such an interesting concept to be able to go so far and deep with so little energy.
Can you share some more info on the technical aspects and subsystems you use, and the depths and ranges you expect out of it? Just me being super curious
Hey Gunnar, I had a look at your AUV, it’s quite impressive!
Inside there is a depth sensor, ping sonar, ELRS receiver for the thruster and rudder. on the surface it’s controlled remotely like a boat, then by flipping a switch on the controller the internal Pi takes over and it starts it’s dives with the bouncy engine.
For the next revision we’re planning to incorporate a blended wing design to maximize range, and some longer range comms for real time data. I’m open to other suggestions as well.
Have you considered repurposing a high aspect hydrofoil? There is a huge variety of incredibly efficient foils available from recreational manufacturers. For example:
These things make an incredible amount of lift at low speed with a minuscule amount of drag. They are carbon fiber (light and indestructible). Could be a really good fit for your application…
Hi Travis, I’ve looked into this before, but I’m not sure what’s on the inside of them, and I’m not sure how deep they can go. if it was solid carbon fiber it might be fine.
That’s great! I’ll have to try this in the future.
I received a small grant to help with my project (thanks Ocean Startup Project!). I’ve used all the funds from this to commission a 500 psi hydrostatic pressure chamber from a local machine shop. I should have this running in another month or two, and have some other buoyancy ideas to test out as well.
At the moment the limiting factor is the rudder serve rated at 300m. I’d have to have a lot more confidence in the system before I’d want it going out that far anyway. at the moment it uses ELRS for comms, but I’d like to upgrade this at some point with something with more range. I have a few systems I’m looking into currently, but I’m definitely open to ideas!
We have used the Sixfab 4G LTE Base Hat with our Rpi4 on the AUV which have worked great. Ofcouse then you are bound to the cellular network.
Then we used aLoRa modules for our emergency buoy. If you get a proper antenna on both ends, which we couldnt fit, I think you can get upwards of 5km. And you can also do alot of mesh networking, relaying the signal through different nodes. Havent tried it but sounds like you one could do some fun stuff with it.
Didnt know about ELRS before but looked it up and it seems you can get some pretty good ranges out of it.
I am very curios about your buoyancy enginge. What ballast technique do you use or plan to incorporate?
Hey Gunner, our buoyancy engine is just two bladders (one external, one internal) and a small pump. our early prototypes used a TPU water bottle for the bladders.
I’m interested to learn more about how you guys are interfacing to your AUV with software/firmware. send me an email if you want to set up a call some time, Brad_smith777@hotmail.com
This is a bit of an older post, my AUV/glider looks like the picture below now.
I’m not quite sure what you mean, but I have it set up so that when I push a button on the RC controller, the receiver turns on an internal Arduino, and that controls the buoyancy pump and dive profile. If you have PWM output you can use a switch like this one. Or you could just get the Arduino to do stuff when it gets the PWM signal right from the receiver. I don’t have a Pi or Blue OS, so I’m not sure how you’d set that up, but I’m sure it can be done.
The yellow parts in the above picture (and below) are 3D printed. This gives me the flexibility to add parts, or change the design quickly. I keep telling myself I’ll look at some stronger options in the future when I start to break these, but I’ve yet too break any 3D printed parts, so it doesn’t seem to be an issue.
When using Ardupilot / Qgroundcontrol the system need to be trick to think the rov still communicate with the surface or it trigger failsafe. This happen at every dive. I never tried programming “false heartbeat” to overcome that. You don’t use Ardupilot so your approach let your this flexibility.
What is the yellow material you print with and what printing technology? The few things I got to print don’t look good like yours:)
We’ll be publishing a guide imminently that covers one approach to automating a BlueOS / ArduSub vehicle, via Lua scripts - it is a companion to this video.
Basically, disabling your failsafes and setting up a lua script to achieve your desired actions is one approach - writing a BlueOS extension to manage the vehicle control entirely is another!
I was using PETG originally, but switched to PLA so i could recycle my waste plastic. I’ve told myself I’ll using something better when my parts start to fail, but everything has been fine so far, so I’ll keep using PLA for now to prototype, then switch it up when I need too.
