Robot afraid of water? - problematic videofeed

Hi forum,
We have a problem with our camerafeed.

We have build a robot based on the Navigator flightcontroller and multiple parts from blue robotics.
The camera we use is a ExploreHD from DWE.
Our problem is that the live videofeed seems to get worse when the robot is put in water and get better again when it comes back up on land.

Does anyone had similar problems?

Can it be because the topside-computer doesn’t share ground with the robot? Could we alternativly fix it with grounding the topside-computer to the body of water the robot is in?

Thanks in advance.

Hi!
Very unlikely it should be related to grounding.
Test the network speed, in and out of water:

Hi Nicklas,

The camera uses H.264 compression so the effect you are seeing is in water when there are more moving objects, the video feed will degrade in order to kept at a set bitrate.

H.264 is an intelligent video compression technique where it divides the video into boxes and in each box, it determines if it needs to constantly update or it can be kept as a still frame to reduce bitrate while maximizing video quality.

It is similar to when you watch a video on YouTube and there are confetti/rain/snow, the video quality degrades. Overtime, as the water becomes more calm, the video quality will increase.

If it is still a problem, this can resolved by increasing the bitrate of the camera or if your ROV supports a decent bandwidth, you can get rid of H264 altogether.

How many camera are you using and what is your tether’s bandwidth?

Hi,
Looking back we forgot to chance around the cameras compression setings. We will definitely try that next time. (y)

We are only using one camera.
I think the bandwidth of the current tether is around 100 Mbps, but we are in the proces of switching to a fibercable tether that should give up to about 1000 Mbps.

Thank you for your response.

Hi,
We will try that next test, thank you!