I have a BlueROV heavy and have integrated the UGPS G2 system from waterlinked. The ROV is running BlueOS.
I am in the process of testing the combined system, and wanted to better understand the expected capabilities. Will I be able to use the UGPS for autonomous waypoint missions?
Hi @JoshuaElliott -
Welcome to the forums!
Yes, ArduSub, the autopilot running in BlueOS, supports autonomous navigation with a valid position source, in Auto mode. We don’t have a guide for its use with the UGPS, but the steps are nearly identical when using the WaterLinked DVL.
There is also good documentation from WaterLinked, found here.
Great, thank you!
We were able to do some testing with the BlueROV and UGPS system. The vehicle was able to get position information from the UGPS, which we could see with the mavlink message viewer in qgroundcontrol. When trying to get the vehicle into auto mode it would refuse based on “AUTO REQUIRES POSITION” I’ve linked to the actual log file below and would be grateful if anyone could shed light on what we need to do. The position and everything was nicely visualized in qgroundcontrol, and we could create a tentative survey grid, but the vehicle repeatedly refused to engage auto mode.
My hypothesis is that something about the quality of the UGPS position information was insufficient for the vehicle to accept it as a valid location stream, but this is only a guess based on the relatively poor accuracy of the UGPS.
We were able to get the vehicle to go into auto mode by setting the “EK2_GPS_CHECK” variable to bypass all the checks (as shown in the attached image). Something about the synthetic NMEA string generated by the waterlinked UGPS system did not pass ArduSub’s quality metrics.
Hoping to test the automode soon in the water
