This discussion in part is to see how viable the current code and mission planner is for the rover to be used as simple steering and direction for a fishing drone/ sea floor mapping drone.

In New Zealand small fishing drones are used to tow out long lines from the beach up to 2 miles out with a maximum of 25 hooks.  These drones or tows, have no smarts other than a timer for distance and rudimentary offsets to take care of drift.

The link below is a typical set up commercially available.

http://www.fishtex.co.nz

We bought one of these as a family project a few years back with a view of automating some of the lacking features, such as automation for a GPS and magnetic heading and feedback to a land computer.

I've done some searching to see how feasible it is to take a platform and turn this into something more usable to take care of the common failures of not being able to have full control and the capacity to map the sea floor as this is important for finding the sort of fish that inhabit some of our cost line.

My questions are:

It seems possible to use the current rover code and mission planner alterations to run simple steering and throttle on a boat platform?

For a depth sounder you can use a pre-built commercial unit that sends out NMEA sentences.  How would it be possible to send or incorporate the GPS data and the message string from the depth sounder?

I've noticed thru searching that this sort of data logging comes up from time to time so in the interest of keeping this all in one place is there any sense in setting up a specific user group for marine data logging.

Thanks