Worthington Sharpe website

Friday 16 October 2015

ROV Control


ROV control typically involves the manipulation of one or two joysticks and range of other input systems. The Wing's joystick functions naturally lend themselves to control of the thrusters in the same way as a standard joystick. 

Some people have concerns over the unfamiliar mouse-like form, but in practice it feels just as intuitive to use as a standard joystick.


Pitch Control

Roll Control


Yaw Control

The Z-height can be used as a rate adjustment to temporarily increase the sensitivity of the thruster speed for finer control.





Things get particularly interesting with the mouse movements. Controlling an ROV with a mouse is not something you see very often and the advantages might not be immediately apparent.

Human-machine input often works best when the type of input matches the type of response required: A foot pedal works well for controlling a car speed where the further you press the pedal, the faster the car goes. A joystick however is not very good for cursor control as you have to move the joystick to accelerate the cursor and then wait for it to get to you target.

The manipulator arm arguably is more similar to the second of these categories You want the arm to move to a point in space, the speed at which it get there is less of a concern.

There are some systems available that use what is essentially a miniature version of the manipulator arm and this directly translates to the arm position. It's just what is needed in a lot of situations but can be tiring to use for long periods and is expensive.

An alternative approach is to map the manipulator arm to track a target defined by the Wing's mouse cursor. All the operator needs to do is to move the cursor to the target location while the arm's control system adjusts the arm until there is a position match. This is just in two dimensions of course, but the scroll wheel provides control of the reach.




Wing cursor target control for ROV manipulator arm










1 comment:

  1. Its look nice. I dont know the main purpose of creating this but if you want to make navigator like 3D connexion then it must not included mouse functions. Because navigating and selecting or deselecting elements/commands sounds strange for now. Maybe we get a try and check what I will feel.

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