Ping sonar operating out of range

I’m developing an AUV and using the ping to run an altitude controller. I’m interesting in how to deal with operating in deep water, where the distance to the seafloor exceeds the max range of the ping.

I’m currently on a research vessel, and the deployment zones are 50-150 meters depth. At the start of the mission, when on the surface and there is ~100m range to the seafloor, the AUV records really unstable ranges, it flickers between 1.5-2meters to 12meters. I was wondering if you have done any testing with how the ping responds in these scenarios?

Other altimeters will respond in some defined way - e.g. 0.0 meters, when in these scenarios. I am interested to know how to identify when there is nothing in range.

Hi Jackson,

Right now there is no defined behavior if a real fix point does not exist, I have created an issue to add this feature in future firmware releases.

Meanwhile, you could accomplish this with two different approaches, fetching and processing the waterfall to check if the reported distance by ping is valid, or run any algorithm/equation that can be used to detect random values, such as variance, interquartile range or median deviation.