Hi everyone!
I have two questions. I see that BlueROV2 uses tether for communication. However it is compatible with any wireless acoustic modem? An if so, what acoustic modem you propose me? I am low in budget. Also I will require anything this to make this feasible? Any open-source code? The second question is about the programmability of the drone, I read the the drone has its own companion computer, so it is possible to run my custom python script in it?
Thank you in advance!
Hi @An.trigeorgi, welcome to the forum
If there was a wireless control option with similar performance and cost to a tether then most vehicles would be using it. Sound waves are much slower than electricity through a wire (or light through an optical fibre), so the usable bandwidth with an acoustic modem is poorly suited for direct control of a vehicle, and is only possible at all for vehicles that have an active positioning system and just receive minimal mission updates through the modem, without needing to send much (if any) data back during operation.
For reference, this acoustic modem has a data rate of 64 bits per second, whereas the network test functionality on our vehicles gives a warning if the data rate between the vehicle and topside is below 40 Mbps (megabits per second), which is roughly 1 million times higher than the data rate that acoustic modem can support. It’s also limited to 200m range, and costs almost twice as much as a 200m long tether.
The BlueROV2 has a Raspberry Pi 4B Onboard Computer that runs BlueOS. You can run custom code on the RPi alongside BlueOS, and if you want you can package your code up into an Extension that can be easily shared with and used by others