Using Waypoints and gathering sonar data

General Discussion
1

Hello,

We have our BlueRov2, 360 sonar and Waterlinked underwater GPS working. Next I would like to expand the capabilities of the system. First, I would like to gather data from all of the systems into one log file. So to get 360 sonar data, underwater GPS and data from ROV itself (pressure etc.) saved to a one file. What would be the easiest way to achieve this? Should I program a python script in the top side computer that listens to certain ports to gather this data? I have read about the mavlink and sockets but the whole picture is not clear to me. Also, the 360 sonar data is probably not straight forward to understand.

Another goal would be to get the ROV move according to waypoints as shown in BlueroRotics videos. I understand that this is not yet fully supported, but should it be possible by just using QGC or does it require additional python scripts etc.? I guess first the position from waterlinked GPS should be relayed to the ROV?

I am not asking to provide ready solutions, but if someone could point me to right direction that would be great!

2
  1. Pixhawk/autopilot sensor data is available via mavlink telemetry. This data can be accessed programatically via UDP with pymavlink for example. The raw (binary) mavlink data is also recorded to a telemetry log file by QGC, and can be processed in post. QGC can also spit out a csv (human readable) with selected telemetry values.
  2. The waterlinked data is accessible via http. The position data is sent to the Pixhawk autopilot automatically and is integrated into the mavlink telemetry stream in (1).
  3. The ping360 data is available via ping-protocol on UDP. ping-viewer records the data, but we have not documented the log format yet.

We don’t have a process to combine/synchronize the ping360 data and the mavlink data, some programming will be necessary.

1 Like
3

Thanks Jacob for the information. We will dig into those. If there are any tips on implementing the movement with waypoints in QGC I would be glad to hear.