It’s been almost 4 years and a couple dozen builds since we first launched our Lanai Pro ROV and this latest revision is the best yet.
Here are some of the latest updates:
Polypropylene frame (3/4in thick) for added strength (you can stand on it)
3.0kg of buoyancy in fresh water
Slightly larger frame easily fits larger sonars
Light JBOX and fuse protection means one damaged light won’t take out the others
Mission Robotics flight computer enables smooth 6 degrees of freedom
larger reel now easily holds 300 or even up to 500m of our 9.3mm OD tether
Mounting bracket fits Ping360, Micron, or Echologger sonar
Power supply under the buoyancy, a fully open deck for gear and accessories
Surface power runs on 90 to 264VAC input.
We’ve already shipped a couple of this revision and will be doing a lot of demos this summer. Please check our website for more details.
Hello Matt.
I’m glad you asked that question. I’ll outline the key reasons we use it on most of our systems below, but the short answer is that it’s the best value option to get the features required by a lot of customers with more stringent demands.
Ardusub/QgroundControl is great for a lot of applications and enables easy customization. The Navigator board coupled with a Pi4 is a good combination and hard to beat for the price. That combination covers plenty of customers. That said, there are some drawbacks that drive people and companies to either build their own flight computer and software, or go to more industrial systems off the shelf systems.
Here are the advantages we feel make Mission Robotics hardware/software worth the switch on our more professional systems:
Video latency - This is by far the biggest advantage, with Mission averaging 100-110ms with the settings we use (1920x1080, 60FPS, 30Mbps). Although you can pilot a system with even a full second of latency, precise tasks like using a manipulator to grab a moving crane hook in the water or hold the ROV as still as possible in heavy swell/surge and shallow water are much more difficult with latency past 100ms. The work class ROV limit is about 100ms, beyond which clients will demand a different camera. This is why low cost IP cameras have not gained wide adoption in the professional market, except for less critical applications like monitoring a pressure gauge and why analog (PAL/NTSC) cameras are still popular with bigger vehicles, despite their drawbacks. This means using SDI or HDSDI cameras (which require fiber tether), GigE cameras with high end encoders (also require fiber) or going to ASIC (Application Specific IC) or FPGA hardware encoders. Because Mission use the NVIDIA Jetson Nano and properly crafted and optimized H.264 encoders, it’s possible to get “glass to glass” latency around 100ms, which is good enough for most jobs.
True 6 degrees of freedom - Getting an ROV to point straight up, hold depth, hold heading, and maintain pitch and roll is not easy and most flight computers or flight management units (FMUs) are not designed to handle this because it’s an edge case. However, some customers actually need this; in particular, when doing ultrasonic thickness (UT) inspections of things like water tanks or performing SLAM and photogrametery work inside tunnels and ship wrecks.
Video quality - The cameras most people use with Ardusub ROVs are good, but not great. HD cameras in the ROV industry are typically larger senors with better light sensitivity and better color control. The upgraded camera Mission Robotics provide rivals $10,000 HD cameras from major subsea manufactures (low latency models anyway). The other issue is the stability of the video. tearing of the video (on key frames I’m assuming) and sudden color/exposure shifts are not a problem for many ROV operators, but for companies performing long and complex inspections of $1B assets on the seafloor, they are a show stopper. The video captured of a mono-pile on o wind farm, a transatlantic fiber cable, or a survey of a high profile vessel recovery “is the product” and the ROV is only there to capture the video. A Billion dollar insurance claim may someday rest on the video taken by that ROV, and so it must be smooth and continuous. The video quality is so good from Mission Robotics, that it’s been used to by the European Maritime Safety Agency and the History Channel to document ship wrecks.
Auxiliary HD cameras - Although you can run IP cameras on many ROVs, the same latency and sensor quality problems are a factor. The Jetson Nano on the Mission Robotics system easily handles 2 aux cameras (same quality) and we can either reduce the bandwidth to accommodate copper tether (about 15Mbps/camera), or switch to a fiber and run 45Mbps for all 3 cameras. Having 3 cameras (with 2 of them on booms mounted to the side) enables our customers to do certain water/sewage/gas pipe line surveys that are not possible on a camera, and typically the videos must all synchronize within small fraction of a second, so IP cameras are not usually an option.
Robust software - By running Linux (something we also do for QgroundControl/Cockpit) and by having the carefully coded user interface (UI) that Mission have created, the software is exceeding stable. Our Lanai Pro and Maui have done 24hr operations for multiple days without so much as a hiccup, let alone a reboot. This is not an issue for an hour long survey at the local aqueduct, but it’s a show stopper when watching for gas leaks from a manifold for 4 days over 8 shifts of pilots. I don’t want to downplay Ardusub; it’s amazing software, but due to the opensource nature and it’s history, it tries to be all things to all people, and often it’s better to have a software architect design the system from the ground up. This is what Mission has done and it’s what many ROV companies do, but most won’t sell the code, as they have Millions $$ into the development and it’s what gives them an edge over their competitors.
Robust hardware and more room - Lastly, there are a couple things about the hardware that make it very robust: almost everything is mounted to one PCB and direct soldered, which reduce risk of loose wires and the tangle and heat inside. And the dense layout leaves enough room for us to put a 5 port Ethernet switch, power switch, 24VDC/60W converter, Supercapacitor backup, and anything else we want. We have done our own boards with 8x Blue ESC30s before, and this is a big improvement in space/reliability, but time is money and we’d rather have Mission focus on that while we focus on our surface power unit, frame design, and accessory integration.
Other good options include Moog (Focal) Prism multiplexers (FPGA based time division multiplexing) which enable HDSDI video, Gigabit, and PAL/NTSC cameras and serial devises. You can couple these with Adusub and Qground control, and some higher end cameras, but it’ll be at least twice the price and still won’t have the clean UI and true 6DOF (we know, we’ve done this with the 914 series cards). If you need HDSDI and near zero latency/jitter for acoustic positioning triggers, this is a good option.
If both Mission Robotics and Blue Robotics did not exist, I have experience coding FMUs for drones and a basic one is not that hard to implement. But again, time is money and although I could do it for only the time invested and some parts, it’s rarely worth it. If I paid a professional to code an FMU/UI in a timely fashion, added all the features I wanted, and paid someone to do the schematic capture and board layout, and then paid that much again to work out all the bugs and get it to the level we can already buy off the shelf, that would easily balloon into a half-million dollar project and it could be much more. I’ve been a project manager where we had to write our own fimware/software and develop our own PCBs for complex subsea projects and $100k is nothing. Outsource it on Upwork and it might be only $100k, but it might not work.
At the very least, get in touch with them if some of those points would be of help to you.
