Ardupilot goes into the water Part 15

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The older you get, the less time you have..
This episode dates back to august of this year, but there are so much projects out, that i can hardly find some time to write.

As mentioned earlier, the project turned from a sea survey one, to a shipbuilding one.
For the ones, that have been waiting for new Dr. Depth pictures i have good news:

A new lake and the story:

After having surveyed my good old diving lake to nearly all of its extents, and haven´t found the 6000m abyss, a new one should be on the list. A friend of mine, is a red-cross volunteer, who is working in his free time as a rescue swimmer on a nearby lake. (there are no familiar relationships to David Hasselhoff - i swear).

So, on one evening of the less rainy days in august, we went to that lake to try out, how the workflow on a new lake would be.

Mission planning by Google-Earth was not directly possible, because the database of GE dated back to 1999. And until now, the lake has received some "modifications" in the form of some pontons and a pier. To avoid unwanted encounters with those objects, we first had to do a pre-survey. For that, we took two kajaks and fixed the catamarane on one of them with a string. With that configuration we made one tour around the lake with little standoff to the shoreline to get the outline of the lake. Then we surrounded the swimming pontons, the pier and the small island in the middle of the lake.




The sampled data was then converted and imported to Google-Earth via KML and then a path of the mission was drawn.
On the early next morning, we went back to the lake with the prepared mission on the ArduPilot.
To keep the adrenaline level low, we decided to follow the boat with the kajaks. A really relaxed survey!
It is nice to see, how the boat behaves when you can follow it on the water! A totally new perspective. All went fine, no crashes and the ship found its path back to the shore after a 30 minute trip. The straight-line behaviour could have been better, but anyway, the measured depth values were more than OK.



The total time spent for this survey mission was less than 5 hours.

And this is the result, that was produced by DrDepth:


Still amazing, what this program produces with not much data.

The KMZ file can be found here:


Next on this blog:

Ardupilot goes into water, episode one -reloaded-
The return to the mountain-lakes.

Stay tuned...
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Comments

  • That is some very nice results. Thanks for sharing.
  • Nicely done, excellent result!
  • Brilliant I love every installment. If possible I'd enjoy and round off your "extras" in your next installment (not the APM stuff or boat but the things that make it yours).
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