Omni Remote controlled Surface vehicle build

[mateov]

Hi @tony-white, I’ll try my best to go trough your suggestions, and give my toughts, and of course more questions. Thank you very much for your time and information provided, I’ll try to be brief and precise as possible.

@tony-white

The Omni frames are not supported by ArduRover for navigation (I think ) - things will be much simpler if you use a simple skid-steer approach like the BlueBoat!

I see this, thank you very much for pointing it out. So basically Omni configurations do not really work for position holding? I was aiming for this setup because I expected it can hold postion precise and easy, due to configuration. Omni configurations then only have manual control?

Is only loiter mode possible in skid-steer (BlueBoat) setup? For position holding with GPS.

Can ArduSub be used for this application maybe? Because lateral movements like on the BlueROV could be applied and used instead of Omni. I guess there would be some modifications required, since ROV is expected to correct roll and pitch, which we do not need or can do on this vehicle. And position hold would also be an option, again, withou roll pitch corrections. What do you think?

@tony-white

A GPS inside an aluminum box will struggle to receive signals from satellites (faraday cage!)…

Agree, but Emlid M2 has separate antenna that will be mounted above water level so GPS will be available.

[quote=“Tony White, post:2, topic:18179, username:tony-white”]
I’m not quite understanding your application - you have a large cleaning vehicle that is deployed from a vessel, and you want it to go around picking up trash? Keeping it cabled to your host vessel seems like it would cause risk to fouling the tether on a prop of one of the two vessels.

@tony-white

Wireless tcp/ip communications will give you good range and sufficient bandwidth for video, the mikrotik radios used in the BaseStation and BlueBoat would be sufficient!

20m is not a significant distance for WiFi - with Omni antennas and the Mikrotik radios of the BlueBoat you should get at least 100-250m!

Great, I will check this more in depth (pun intended ). I can mount the antena for Mikrotik like it is mounted on BlueBoat, so im outside faraday cage of aluminium box. Am I right?

@tony-white

Depending on the power consumption and voltage level, 20m of cable can cause a lot of loss! You can calculate that here.

Thanks for the calculator, I did not know you had one on your site! For DC dual cable (like on the T500 thruster) is in my opinion good option. What do you think?

@tony-white

We’ve used both the steamdeck and windows based gaming handhelds to control the BlueBoat and BlueROV2 via Cockpit and QGround Control. We’ve not tested with any herelink products, but I would generally recommend against the Pixhawk platform.

Great to hear handhelds work. I’ve see this topic is related and recent so I will link here for others.
Is Cockpit always used via internet browser, or is there an app (released or planned for future)? And do you have any prefference or advice on choosing the handhelds?

@tony-white

BlueOS is required to use the Navigator - the Navigator does not host a microcontroller that runs the autopilot code like the Pixhawk or other autopilots. A Docker container on the Raspberry Pi 4 does! ArduRover is fully supported by the Navigator.

From a connection standpoint, you will need your Boat electronics to be on the same network as your topside control computer - in Blue Robotics systems this is the 192.168.2.0/24 subnet. We’ve not used the herelink system so I’m not familiar with any differences in its connections!

Thanks for clearing this up!

In the end, I really appreciate the effort and thank you in advance for your answers/comments!