I am assistant professor of robotics at École Centrale de Nantes (France) and we have ordered a BlueROV 1 in order to do underwater robotics labs for our engineer students.
I am planning to work in simulation while the robot will be built in group projects, and I cannot find the propellers placement in the robot frame. I built a ROS/Gazebo package that allows control with thruster force and of course it relies on the thruster control matrix that links the thruster force to the wrench that is applied on the body frame.
Thanks for the link, I got the actual translation of each thruster navigating through the source files.
Also, I’m quite impressed with the new BlueRov2. When you say vectored thruster, it is simply because their orientation axes are not pure XYZ? Because we also speak of vectored thruster when the thrust angle can be actively controlled.
In the next weeks I will be releasing a simulator for BlueROV1 based on my current works on AUV dynamic simulation. The STL files are in mm and need to lose a bit of weight to be used efficiently in Gazebo.
The “vectored” term for ROVs originates from the fact that combined thrusters can create a thrust vector in any direction in the X-Y plane. The thrusters are not articulated. I agree it’s a bit confusing!