Safeguards against undesired behavior in tetherless AUTO mode over WiFi

I have a rather unique problem – we have a bottom-mounted tetherless AUV that we program at the surface over WiFi with a delay on the AUTO mission, lower to the bottom, then after a time it begins its mission (then surfaces afterwards to re-connect).

Since we will lose GCS heartbeat once submerged, I turned that safeguard off. I congifured the AUV to surface if any of the other failsafes trigger (leak, pressure, temperature, etc).

I don’t think there is any way we can communicate with the ROV while it is underwater, right? That is, some way to shut off the mission if it starts doing it incorrectly, like a “big red button”.

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!

Hi @cda -
An optical or acoustic modem may be one way to interface with the vehicle underwater! You may need to develop a LUA script to provide this functionality to the autopilot…

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An acoustic modem is probably the only option, and they can be complex and expensive to buy, there are some open source versions out there, I’m working on integrating one of these to a project i’m working on.