Hey all,
I recently purchased and built a BlueRov and have been controlling it manually which works great, however I also want it to be able to run automatically. I know with copters and planes using ArduPilot you are able to draw up a path on a map and they can use GPS signals to ensure they stay on their path, however, ArduSub doesn’t support this. I will admit I am fairly new to both the software side and autonomous vehicles in general. I am just wondering a few things. Has anyone else tried a similar thing and if so, were you successful? How did you do it? Is this a current development for the BlueRov because I saw some mentions that GPS releases weren’t stable. How would I even implement this in QGroundControl. We only want to pilot the Rov at depths of up to 3 metres, so we will probably mount the GPS on top of the Rov and out of the water, so our main issue is getting software support. Would it be possible to merge parts of the ArduPilot and ArduSub together?
Thanks in advance!
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Hi @hbillings,
ArduSub is part of the ArduPilot project, and has access to the same libraries as other ArduPilot firmwares. It should work to use a surface-based GPS for position-enabled flight modes (including for things like GPS-based missions) if you’re able to keep the GPS out of the water, but that may not be a trivial task.
A GPS unit on a 3m long pole could contribute significant drag as the vehicle tries to move through the water, and may also get caught on things and/or tip the vehicle over if it rotates away from vertical.
If it’s of interest, there’s some additional discussion of surface-based GPS usage in this thread, and position-based control in the second half of this comment.
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