Long Range Autonomous Drone Boat - Build and Tuning

big thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video last year i built this autonomous catamaran and sent it on a 13-mile waypoint mission across lake washington you should definitely go check out that video if you haven't seen it already the ending is pretty good i needed to redeem myself so i started building a new autonomous boat this time around i decided to go with a single hull design it might be a little bit less practical than a catamaran because it's not as stable but there's something cool about seeing a single hole bashing through the waves i decided to build the hole out of this half inch insulation foam in hindsight i probably would have used something different because this styrofoam is terrible stuff i cut two strips taped the ends together and then shoved other pieces of foam in width width-wise to form the shape after that i glued the bottom on and shaved off all the overhang i filled the front and back cavities with expanding foam for additional structure and for redundant buoyancy if the hole were to fill with water for the top i just used dollar tree foam board here's where things started to go south this is my biggest composite layup to date and it was a big learning experience for the first layer of fiberglass i used some epoxy resin that i had had laying around for a while it was actually specified for boats i didn't get a picture of it but for whatever reason it got under the plastic layer on top of the styrofoam and started melting a section of it in an attempt to fix this i covered the melted section in expanding foam i taped over it while it cured and then shaved it down with a knife and sanded it flat there were still some pretty big air pockets in it so i spackled over that and then sanded it down flat after that it was more layers of fiberglass and i used bondo resin which was a real mistake it's designed for small layup jobs like fixing cracks in your shower and stuff like that so the cure time is way too fast because of that i had to do small sections at a time and it ended up not being very smooth that led to the need for more spackle more sanding and more painting but eventually after days of work i got it pretty smooth and then painted it bright yellow next up was the propulsion system i decided to do two underwater motors and one air motor for redundancy i designed an mjf printed some prop guards that would hopefully block seaweed from getting tangled in the propellers i had problems with that with my first autonomous boat mjf printing allowed me to make the walls super thin so it's hopefully extra hydrodynamic i'm just using some cheap propeller and shaft sets that i got off the internet i had to cut the shafts to the right length and then solder the brass end caps back on even though the escs would be mounted in the hole where it's dry i waterproofed them with epoxy just to be safe to form a waterproof seal around the propeller shafts i capped off one end and filled the tube with petroleum jelly i had to heat the petroleum jelly up to a liquid before injecting it into the tube i then pushed the propeller shaft through and extruded out all the excess petroleum jelly since this boat is so long and narrow i was not able to mount the propellers very far apart so i wasn't very confident that differential thrust was going to steer it very well but anyhow i drilled angled holes in the hole and pushed the motor shafts through i then cut a hatch on the top of the boat so that i could access the interior to mount the motor shafts i put silicone all over the holes and shoved them in making sure the silicone formed a solid seal around the shafts here's a shot of the motors i used i 3d printed some motor mounts that held the motors onto the shafts with some four to six millimeter shaft couplers in between these are old low kv multi-rotor motors that are probably far from optimal for this application but it doesn't really matter because i'm not trying to get a lot of power out of these submerged motors this boat will go slow for high efficiency to power this boat for long distance missions i needed batteries that would last a really long time i decided to go with six of these rb10 pvc batteries from rely on they have life po4 chemistry and each battery has its own bms so they're much safer than lipos here's the hull with all six batteries mounted inside big thanks to rely on for hooking me up with these batteries check them out in the link in the description at one point i accidentally stepped on these prop protectors and cracked them but it was a quick fix with some starbond ca also big thanks to starbond for sending me some of their super glues here's the thrust vectoring air motor i installed with a servo to move it around the purpose for this is redundancy if the lower propellers were to get stuck in seaweed the boat would hopefully still be able to drive with the air motor alone i built this mast on the top that was able to fold down so that i could fit the boat in my truck on the top of the mast is the telemetry radio for all the audiopilot data that gets sent back to my laptop ground station i built a hatch for the top out of foam board and used window sealant strips around the edge to hopefully keep the water out all the electronics are mounted on this little shelf for quick access it slides in above the batteries and is easy to remove after the build was finished i took the boat out to the lake for the first test some people asked me what this thing is and i told him it was a research vessel for detecting kova 19 and the whale population the whales in the pond are always sick god damn it oh this is a disaster that sucks it doesn't even float upright it kind of stays on that side but then if i tilt it on this side it goes way over one motor is completely out of the water it goes though there's so much weight in the bottom of this thing that i thought it was definitely gonna float upright just fine it's got a ton of ballast weight it's really heavy but apparently that's not enough bye i hope it comes back a majestic vessel it's got a little bit of a gangster lean but that's okay i decided that i needed to get the center of gravity lower and every little bit helps so i picked all the foam out of the base of the boat this is where styrofoam becomes an absolute nightmare i would definitely recommend avoiding it if you can but anyways i got all that cleared out and then poured a fresh layer of epoxy into the bottom of the boat to make a nice hard floor it started getting all over the motors so to prevent them from binding up while the epoxy cured i just turned them on lowering the cg by a half an inch alone was not enough to make the boat float upright so i also brought 15 pounds of extra ballast to add look at that floats upright amazing it's uh it's really heavy now i think with all that weight in there it's like 40 pounds sick oh i'm excited to have this thing plowing through some waves after building a boat i now have no idea how boats work because when you see one of those big container ships with just a giant pile of containers on top that thing has got to be so top heavy unless the bottom is just packed full of like pure tungsten or something it really just seems to defy the laws of physics now a quick word from the sponsor of this video skillshare having a wide range of skills is crucial for projects like this one it involves design fabrication prototyping engineering photography videography and more skillshare is an online learning community where millions come together to take the next steps in their creative journey with thousands of awesome classes for creative and curious people on a whole range of topics including illustration design photography video entrepreneurship and more one of my favorites is this class on outdoor photography by chris bercard he has a lot of awesome tips for everything from composition to post processing skillshare is also incredibly affordable at only 10 a month with an annual subscription the first 1000 people to use my link in the video description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so you can explore your creativity big thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video here's the first real test drive the boat was super easy to control in manual mode and it seems to work great the only issue i noticed at first was that water would hit the air propeller so i need to trim that down eventually or just not do the final waypoint mission in rough water i think my feet are number than they've ever been but this thing drives great so i'm happy looks pretty dry inside i don't see any water around the edges there's a few drops on the tops of things but that's probably from the rain nice that's awesome shout out to my patreon supporters i used the money for some rubber boots so now i don't freeze my feet off amazing patreon link in the description support the channel so the boat is having trouble navigating through waypoints and i think it's because the air motor turns out to be the primary source of steering control and for whatever reason when it's doing wave points autonomously it doesn't always turn on the air motor it's kind of relying mostly or it's trying to rely mostly on the water motors so as a test i'm just going to set the air motor to be continuously always on and then run a waypoint mission and see how it does it seems to be doing a much better job now so i just need to find out a way to make the autopilot keep the air motor on when it's in a mission or figure out a way to extend that servo actuation down into a water rudder or something like that so i remapped the air motor throttle endpoints but i'm still having issues in auto mode it seems like when it overshoots a waypoint or something it just drops the throttle way down and tries to turn without very much throttle and that just causes the air motor to not do anything i'll continue uh tweaking and tuning things and just see what works hopefully i find some solution but i might have to make a water rudder so far it seems like it's working pretty well uh oh beyond line of sight hope this works oh i just realized there's uh oh there's wind out there oh no i'm gonna have to manually drive this thing back okay emergency mode hopefully i still have a control signal come on baby turn oh jeez it's rocking and rolling it seems to be turning slowly though this could be bad it's not doing very well at turning into the wind though oh what have i done oh yeah for sure uh not enough not well enough that's what i learned today i almost lost it i i'm surprised i got it back that beach was too tight for this boat especially in its current state i need to go back to a wider open area for more tuning so to fix the tuning problem i 3d printed a rudder that extended down off the air motor into the water at first it seemed like it was working great but then things started to get weird it is definitely not doing what it's supposed to this is kind of strange no wonder my freaking push rod came out it was just held in by gravity so that clearly needs to be fixed that'll hopefully do the trick for now so i'm thinking now that the steering control has been improved with the rudder it might even be over tuned now i might have the rate feed forward set too high so it might like overshoot the turning commands we'll see before i had it turned all the way up and it was uh still like barely controllable so it was undershooting the turns if anything still seems to be overshooting the waypoint quite a bit but that's kind of what i would expect for a heavy boat like this it's a race swimmer versus boat at this point the waypoint performance was pretty good but i'd later find out that it still needed some tuning i had to yield to the swimmer i almost ran into her okay back to mission mode you got a name for the vote nope no names no any ideas you know you're you know you've got thousands of years of naval tradition here you can't uh put a boat out without a name on it well crap i'll have to think of something yeah you gotta come up with something the the yellow the banana slug there you go i actually like that the banana slug it is that's bananas yeah that's a good one and they can put some big black swatches on the side yeah well here's what would be really cool man if you could find any of those big sturgeon in the lake you were probably still like in grade school but about 10 or 15 years ago there was a dead one that washed up that was like i don't know 10 or 11 feet long really yeah holy cow and you're starting to get hundreds of years old you know that's crazy yeah and uh you know they're six eight ten feet long damn yeah does anyone ever catch those things what does anyone ever catch them yeah oh yeah but my uh my great grandpa he used to look down along the plumbing down by vancouver and to get a surge you need to take a chicken and he'd make him hook in his hammer and anvil and a cable on him just throw in the river and when something was on he hit your mule to it and and pull it out uh during the depression they would poke them and then yeah pedal them door to door you know wow that's hilarious i've never heard of fishing with a mule before all right pal you have a good day hey you too well that was a successful day of tuning uh tomorrow i'll have to do like a medium range waypoint mission and try and get an idea of how much endurance this thing has i think it'll be able to drive like all day this new rudder is awesome it works really well oh why's that so loose oh wait wow my pushrod was just held on with tape that whole time it came out of the hole on the servo arm again that's no good gotta get that fixed so i've come back to the safe enclosed waters of green lake and i'm going to do the first kind of mid long-range mission there's also more lakeweed here so i'm hoping to get a chance to test the new prop protectors actions set mode it's in auto mode now whoa it looks like it's oscillating a ton now that there's no waves now that the water's flat maybe that makes it grossly over tuned now i guess i gotta detune it see if that works turn the feet forward down to like one looks like it's still wiggling a little bit dang i'll turn that down even more looks like it's tracking pretty straight now maybe wiggling a little bit still i think it might also be caused by the steering being out of trim i think if i were to trim it straighter it would definitely help a lot the control system is still overtuned but it's hard to tell because the oscillation frequency is really low you can clearly see it here in the tuning graph that shows the desired steering rate versus the achieved steering rate wow it's so far away just a little speck out there [Music] it made it back amazing beautiful during that 1.8 mile drive the battery only dropped 0.4 volts and that was at the high end of the voltage range this makes me think that this boat should have really long endurance and be able to drive for hours and hours on that charge so i spent probably 30 minutes tuning in the steering pid values and now it's running waypoints a lot more smoothly there's still a little oscillation between the rudder and the yaw rate but i think that just needs a little bit of rate filtering maybe hms banana slug is a long ways from home yeah has he ever been this far away well i took it to green lake yesterday and i went all the way across the lake so yeah this is uh my first longer range test on rough water like this i don't even see it yeah i don't see it either until i look through this thing oh is that it over there it's way out there yeah wow that's so far away and it's not even halfway yet so today i wanted to do another longer range mission to verify the tuning parameters that i arrived at yesterday but the thing is the water's a bit rougher so if it still is over tuned that won't really show up because the boat's already moving around so much but uh looks like it's doing pretty well on this mission i am a bit concerned though because i think though the waves out in the middle of the lake will be bigger amazing ss banana slug can't do that that's for sure ooh it feels like the wind is picking up now too that's a little concerning come on ss banana slug you can do it way point five there we go we're on the home stretch now oh it's so far away that's amazing a little boat big world damn that thing is rocking and rolling land a ho look at this at what point in the waypoint mission this became unplugged i'm not sure but i think it made it back purely on underwater motor power looks like the redundancy feature is working well so that's enough for one video in the next video i'll be trying to redeem my 13 mile waypoint mission so we'll see if the ss banana slug is up for the task so stay tuned thanks for watching bye while we're still on the subject of boats recently we had a rare snowstorm in seattle and did some land boating if you will here's some bonus footage of that oh no [Applause] yeah boy come on yeah boy oh you can make it oh yes yes oh yeah oh

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 648,981

Rating: 4.9146137 out of 5

Keywords: autonomous, boat, ardurover, long range, FPV, rc, ship

Id: P70vn8QD9wA

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021