Hello everyone!
I am trying to set up the ping sonar with ArduRover (V4.5.4, flashed on an OrangeCube+). I was able to use a USB2RS232 adapter to verify that the sonar works (firmware version: V3.29). Then I followed this tutorial to configure ardurover and used the appropriate connector to connect the sonar to the serial 2/telem 2 port. However, I am not able to get any data from the sonar in the mission planner. Also, once connected, mission planner shows the following message:

“PreArm: Rangefinder 1: No Data”

I would appreciate any help with this

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I have a large-ish rover, Vigorun mower platform, VTLM600.

The motor encoder takes PWM input, with channel 0 operating each tread in opposing directions, and channel 1 operating them in the same direction. These inputs mix effectively creating GroundSteering and Throttle interfaces respectively. This motor controller is proprietary to the chassis and does not have other modes of operation, period. I cannot setup the motors to operate independently, if I could, I would.

Operating GroundSteering channel in manual without throttle performs a pivot turn. Operating with throttle performs as you would expect- it pulls down the motor speed in the direction of the desired turn. Is there a way to get rover to perform pivot turns in this setup?

I have no issues with manual control, but on auto / using waypoints the chassis overshoots massively and cannot follow plans correctly, even though the chassis seems to understand its position / yaw.

Platform is a SIYI N7 + SIYI MK32 ground station / controller.

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Hi guys,

I’m trying to tune the steering of a big rover 4.5.2 (boat/raft with vectored steering) but as I expected it turned out to be very difficult. However what I experienced today was that Guided worked pretty OK (arrives on target, just a bit of zig zaging but not that bad), whereas Auto didn’t work good at all (last mission it just went in circles).

Does this make any sense? I thought those modes were using pretty much the same sensor input and logic, but today Guided felt pretty solid and Auto did not.

Regards,
Andreas

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I’m trying to integrate a VN-100T into a Blue Robotics Navigator board running ardurover.

What messages should be output from the VN100T so that the navigator can read them?

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Sailing boat loiter

Good day.

I have this cute little project with my son to make a sailing boat with an automatic loiter button and two little motors, forcing the boat to always stay against the wind thanks to this bi-motor configuration.

How can we sense the wind direction and tell the two motors to always keep the boat in that direction ?

Thank you

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Hello All

I seem to be having an issue with um982 gps.

All has been working well, I upgraded to Rover 4.53 and now seem to be getting PreArm: Internal errors 0x100000 l:256 flow_of_ctr.

If I do a preflight reboot the error disappears vehicle operates as usual but on full power cycle PreArm: Internal errors 0x100000 l:256 flow_of_ctr returns.

Also if I boot autopilot then plugin GPS 20sec after boot no internal error occurs. Seems to be a boot sequence issue.

On the Messages screen on Mission planner the boot sequence doesn’t seem to get past the EKF3 IMU initialised point.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

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Hi everyone,

I plan to build a Rover to run on the roof, so I am worry about the rove will drop from the roof. I want to use Sonars HC-SR04, to detect the out of the roof situation, for example, the sonars is mounted toward the roof, if in the roof, the distance is 8cm, if out of the roof, the distance is larger than 10cm. then my rover will backward 20cm and turn right.

and if my rover is running with the mode of auto, and was set waypoint, but because the GPS precision, it may go out the roof and drop. so during the auto mode, how can I integrate the sonars to the ardupilot firmware to guide the rover backward 20cm, turn right and auto running along the waypoint again?

Can someone give me some advice or ideas?

Thanks a lot!

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I’m currently tuning my PID settings but experiencing erratic behavior in my responses. No matter the values I set for P, I, and D, and even following the ArduPilot guidelines, I can’t get smooth curves. My response is all over the place. Any advice?

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log_0_未知日期.zip (254.6 KB)
Why is the vehicle driving slowly in guided mode? This is my log. Can you help me analyze it?@ rmackay9

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I make a USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle) using Pixhawk 6C and Power Management Module (PM07). The wiring I made was in accordance with the existing instructions. I soldered the 2 power cables from esc on M1 and M3 on PM07. But when I connected them to the 6s battery, a fire came out from the direction of the ESC towards the BLDC motor from M1 at PM07, while the ESC at M3 did not happen anything. By the naked eye and the checks I have made, the wires that I have soldered are not connected for positive and negative. Has anyone experienced the same problem as me? How can I check the condition of my PM07 or my ESC after the incident? If indeed port M1 on my PM07 is damaged, are M2 to M8 on my PM07 fine? Or does it have a problem too? Please help me

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After almost loosing a boat to a glitch in the minipix (or a programming error), I decided to incorporate a safety switch to turn control back to my receiver.

I’m using a 12ch receiver and sbus communication to the minipix. So to switch control from the minipix to my receiver, I did the following. I wired the motor and rudder outputs of the minipix and receiver through a dpst NC micro relay triggered by a pwm switch on my receiver’s channel 7. With the switch off, my signal wires are passed from the minipix to the motor and rudder. If the minipix has a brain fart, I turn on channel 7 activating the relay, which now passes the signal wires from my receiver to the motor and rudder giving me full manual control. Now I can navigate my boat back to the dock rather than watching it disappear into the horizon.

Hopes this helps others.

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Hi everyone,

I’m working on a project involving a differential steering boat that navigates solely based on vision. The system is built using ROS2 and MAVROS and Gazebo simulation. My main challenge is operating in Guided mode without GPS with attitude_target messages.

I’ve experimented with adjusting the EKF and AHRS parameters, but it hasn’t led to the desired outcome. Unfortunately, I don’t have the capability to estimate the position using other sensors. What I managed to achieve so far is that the boat remains in Guided mode after losing GPS, but I’m unable to navigate because of AHRS which doesn’t work without GPS input.

Has anyone had experience with maintaining control in Guided mode without GPS? Any tips or advice on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

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Hi guys,

Sorry for this TL;DR post.

So, I have this huge raft that I’m trying to control using ArduPilot (I’m riding along at all times, so very little risk for collision with others) . But I’m about to give up on the tuning, so looking for some advice on where to focus going forward before I bury the project.
The raft is 4x10 meters
3 rows of pontoons. Rounded underneath, so basically no keel.
Dry weight approx 1500kg
Powered by an electric outboard (Haswing Ventura 5.0) i.e. Vectored thrust
FC is Matek H743 Slim V3 running Rover 4.5.2
GPS is Holybro M9N DroneCAN
Telemetry via ESP32 (Dronebridge)
GSC is Mission Planner
Max speed is about 2 - 2.5 m/s but I usually cruise around 1.5-1.9.

The steering angle of the outboard is controlled using a home built servo (stepper motor with pulley and feedback pot). It’s not perfect, nor fast, but it works for me in manual mode. Driving this vehicle manually requires a constant flow of small corrections to keep her straight. It’s just that I’m unable to teach the FC to do it as well as me.

The throttle is electronically controlled using a microcontroller with a digipot that’s emulating the throttle signal from the original throttle lever.

On the tuning part. I think I’ve successfully tuned the speed/throttle controller reasonably OK. But the Turn Rate controller overshoots a bit, which I ultimately think makes it impossible for the navigation controller to do a proper job. And the only way to get that somewhat OK is to turn down the turn rate gains by a lot. Or cap the ATC_STR_RAT_MAX (it can do around 7 if unlimited). But even then, I can’t get it to complete an auto mission without weaving big time.

I suspect, due to its weight, there is too much mass involved, that makes it 1) slow to react to “desiredpid” demands, and 2) overshoots if too agressively tuned and then turns into weaving. My servo is not fast - takes about 6 seconds to go full left to right, but most of the (manual) navigation takes way smaller corrections to keep it on a straight path. So the effective time of changing the angle is much less. I just mean the servo is physically able to do it. The question is if there is a chance I can get Rover to do the same?

For some time I thought the problem was mainly the PSC_POS_P parameter being way to high for the vehicle. I reduced it to 1E-13 which I think improved things a bit. But I’m not that sure anymore.

I have some logs. But unfortunately I don’t have any clean runs where I’m not changing any parameters during the sessions. So just providing what I have here.

I have some logs, even though I realize the testing has not been very structured.

A session where I did some auto. Got a bad gyro error (I think due to rebooting the FC on a wavy lake, when not being still…) but hopefully that’s not the issue here.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w55f6xqggsbjzvdbw7tf8/00000105.BIN?rlkey=48ecm37awghnl5v5t3g146hpk&st=urc5as0v&dl=0

A mix of everything, not sure if useful
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ikknjx9gchp3s1jg5fj0m/00000106.BIN?rlkey=7xxjulbf0bmxb1xpfea6e9i8i&st=plg1wsr4&dl=0

I think mostly driving around in Acro (trying to tune the steering rate controller)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xkmea9y2ubadauqi44vnl/00000107.BIN?rlkey=tqienq2ulbfdzqjkb9lybr82l&st=ciq4da7r&dl=0

If the logs are useless, I’m happy to collect new ones based on instructions.

Where should I focus next? Improve my servo agility? Just spend more time on tuning the rate controller? Please be nice

Any help is very much appreciated.

Best Regards,
Andreas

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Hi, Im looking for a nice way to send the mower home after mowing one of 3 paddocks.

The mower lives in the shed. I’d like to flick the RTL switch and have the mower head home, but not through the fences or gate.

I can load a specific " go home from paddock 1 or 2 or 3 " mission, but it sucks loading a whole new mission, just to go home. Note - the gate is always closed due to stock, so the mower needs to wait until an all clear command of some kind before driving through it. Its a clear run from WP1 to WP2 etc

Any help or pointers appreciated.

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Hello,

i spend most of my time reading and gaining experience in how to use ArduRover. Let me explain where we are and what i’m looking for.

We have a 22m Boat (Catamaran, 2 full electric Pod Engines) where we try to hook Ardurover to to make it easier for Students to get started in various topics like Collision Avoidance.
The boat is with people on board that we request access to the engines from, that are in charge to keep us and the boat safe and can overrule any of our steering commands and take back control.
we have all nessesary papers and permissions by the authorities to do these kind of experience here in the area.

The Pod-Engines are fully rotatable 360degrees (to go backward you have to rotate them) and if they do not have any throttle there is no steering power, we don’t have a classical rudder.
SkidSteering does not work due to limited power and the motors beeing way at the back of the boat and the boat beeing hevy up front. The Pods can be controlled by NMEA0183 messages both independent form each other.
FlightController is a Raspberry Pi4 with a Navio2 Module running ArduRover 4.5.4. We utilize an onboard Hemisphere GPS Receiver wich also outputs Heading so we disabled the compass of the Navio Module and configured Ardurover to use the external compass.

In First step we captured the PWM Outputs for direction and thrust with a microcontroller and converted them to the coresponding NMEA Messages. This worked fine but we decided to go a different route by adding mavproxy, outputting the MAVLINK PWM Outputvalues to MQTT and then feeding it through NodeRed to the NMEA Interface.
This works in manual mode very well besides the boat beeing difficult to steer and to drive a straight line.
We the went to Arcro Mode for tuning and are able to run a Line with a little bit of left-right-osciliation.
We figured out this to be a problem in the steering mechanism of the pods because the only turn if we send a target-direction for the pod that is 2 or more degrees of the actual position for more then one second. the hydrylic steering system in addition is not straight on point when you tell it to point at 0 degreen it might be ± .5 degrees.

When switch to Auto-Mode things get complicated so i try to understand a couple of things and trying to find the right parameters. Might be somebody here has some expierience in a simmilat project.

Let’s get started with the questions:

• is there any kind of parameter for our problem with there beeing no rudder to tell ardupilot to generate thrust to turn if the vehicle is in motion? in Automode we observe thrust going to zero, the ship still having a speed of about 3m/s and it turns the direction and nothing happens or the ship turning in a random direction.
• is there any kind of parameter for the steering-dead-zone like “if you change direction then in Steps more than 2 degrees” we can look at?
• when going to auto mode with waypoints in a squre at about 1x1km it tries to meet the line between waypoints with an angle of 90 degrees and then keeps turning half circles allong the line. is there any paramter in Rover like NAVL1_PERIOD or NAVL1_DAMPENING in Ardupilot to make it aim at the line between the waypoints in a less agressive manner by aiming way more forward?
• are there any other best ptractise parameters for large vehicles that can be tuned?

If intrested i have a log of todays 7h drive which was abour half done via Ardupilot.

Hope to get someone intrested in exchangeing knowlege for automating larger vehicles

Nils

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Hi all,

The wiki for the Vectored Thrust functionality of ArduBoat shows clearly a graph describing how the Thrust is calculated for different values of Steering.

I was wondering if anyone is aware of the actual mathematical function used for Vectored Thrust, or if anyone can point me to the Github page where this is included as I haven’t been able to find it myself.

Cheers

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I have built an autonomous mower on the Speedybee F405 Wing FC.

When loading my first mission, I ran into a 308 item limit.

I saw SD board mission and Lua workaround so I built a custom firmware to include those capabilities while removing others from the build.

Now I can set the options, but it does not seem to work at all.

Am I forever lost with the 1MB flight controller or is there hope out there for me somewhere?

Thanks,

Allen

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Hi Brains trust,

After updating the firmware to Rover 4.5.4, the WP_RADIUS distance has no affect. Observing the ASV on an AUTO mission with WP_RADIUS set to 8m the ASV drives all the way to the waypoint before switching to the next waypoint on mission (and overshoots the waypoint in the process).
After checking everything I could think of, I tried resetting parameters to default and reconfiguring the Cube Orange with no change.

Basic config = Cube orange, Here 4 GPS, RFD 900 modems, Blue Robotics ping sonar, 2 * T200 thrusters (Skid Steer),

Rolling back to 4.2.3 (the version currently on our other ASV) fixes the WP_RADIUS
problem, I.E the vehicle starts it’s turn the prescribed distance before the waypoint. But does not support the Here 4 GPS module (with all it’s E5 goodness)

.bin file

Apologies, there’s a large chunk of no action at the start of the log file.
And there’s only a rough tune on it after the reset to defaults.

I am assuming that I am missing something fundamental

Thanks in advance
Boxy

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Rover-4.5.5-rc1 has been released for beta testing and can be installed using MP or QGC’s beta firmwares link. Alternatively it can be directly downloaded from firmware.ardupilot.org.

The changes vs 4.5.4 are in the ReleaseNotes and also copied below

1. Board specific enhancements and bug fixes

• fixed IOMCU transmission errors when using bdshot
• update relay parameter names on various boards
• add ASP5033 airspeed in minimal builds
• added RadiolinkPIX6
• fix Aocoda-RC H743Dual motor issue
• use ICM45686 as an ICM20649 alternative in CubeRedPrimary

2. System level minor enhancements and bug fixes

• correct use-after-free in script statistics
• added arming check for eeprom full
• fixed a block logging issue which caused log messages to be dropped
• enable Socket SO_REUSEADDR on LwIP
• removed IST8310 overrun message
• added Siyi ZT6 support
• added BTFL sidebar symbols to the OSD
• added CRSF extended link stats to the OSD
• use the ESC with the highest RPM in the OSD when only one can be displayed
• support all Tramp power levels on high power VTXs
• emit jump count in missions even if no limit
• improve the bitmask indicating persistent parameters on bootloader flash
• fix duplicate error condition in the MicroStrain7

5. Other minor enhancements and bug fixes

• specify pymonocypher version in more places
• added DroneCAN dependencies to custom builds

BTW, there will be another beta release (e.g. -rc2) shortly to fixup some issues with the CubeRed so CubeRed users may want to wait for -rc2 before beginning testing.

Beta testing is a really important stage that greatly improves AP’s stability so thanks very much for your help!

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Hello everyone,

I’m experiencing an issue with my rover simulated in Gazebo using ArduPilot. No matter what command I send, my rover only moves backward in a straight line. I have checked my SDF file multiple times but can’t seem to identify the source of the problem.

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