R/C Autonomous Boat 30 Mile Waypoint Mission

big thanks to simplisafe for sponsoring this mission in my last video of the uss banana slug i calculated that it should be able to go 70 miles or 113 kilometers with the amount of battery on board up until that point the furthest it had ever driven was only 13 kilometers so i wanted to do a bit more of a shakedown before i had the confidence to set out for a much longer mission to do this i chose the windiest day i could find and put the boat in the water to see how it would do at first it was not able to turn into the wind at all this was mainly because the air propeller would throttle down during turns but this is where a lot of its turning authority came from since the motor would pivot with the rudder to fix this i increased the minimum pwm for the air motor so that it would never turn off after that the boat was able to hit all its waypoints there it goes she's turning now power needs more power this little test ended up saving me on my next mission which was a 30 mile route all the way along banks lake in eastern washington oh what an adventure it turned out to be good morning it's 3 a.m and i just woke up i just arrived at the lake i was here last night kind of scoping it out there's a dam right here so i'm gonna launch the boat basically right off the dam i'm starting this early in the morning to hopefully avoid boats whoa look at the moon that's super spooky just powered on the boat i'm gonna get mission planner connected here okay i'm gonna drive it in manual mode a little bit just to make sure it goes sure does go fantastic let's start this mission oh there's a bat flipping into auto mode now i just turned off my remote controller so it's just fully autonomous now we got a tailwind which is nice little boat big world good luck out there little buddy oh now what do i do go back to sleep or keep monitoring it we're doing 1.1 meters per second roughly it does kind of look like the boat's not tracking perfectly straight that makes me think maybe seaweed got caught on one side but hopefully not it's gonna be a long day i think this should take about 12 hours so i got the computer here riding co-pilot we are just exiting the park heading to the next observation points it's crazy that i'm still getting good telemetry signal even when i'm driving through the city here and the boat is way out on the lake it's going through buildings and everything that's kind of eerie there's an airport ahead of me and i can see the beacon looks like i'm going off-roading now google says this is a road this looks like a pretty bad road it's really good time for four-wheel drive oh yeah this feels pretty soft uh i don't know if people actually come here this is just like large sagebrushes that i'm driving over and then a bunch of whoopty doo's wow these are big sage brushes oh geez oh what am i doing okay i still haven't gotten any telemetry signal yet but i'm on the top of a hill now so hopefully we'll be getting one soon oh there we go now i'm getting signal all right we passed wave point number three that's lovely so i am somewhere up here in these dirt roads i think i can actually see the boat here that definitely looks like it to me looks like the battery voltage is remaining pretty consistent it hasn't dropped anymore but it did drop a lot at first so that's a little bit concerning ground speed is looking good we must have a tailwind i'm glad that we're passing a lot of these more populated areas really early in the morning it's still 4 36 because uh people won't be out boating for a while i'm sure fishermen will get out pretty early but hopefully not for a while still okay i'm gonna head to my next observation point oh boy another sagebrush tunnel oh this one's real narrow wow the sides of my car is going to be so clean but enough about me how about you oh yeah it looks like the boat's doing great pavement hallelujah okay i don't know where i am but uh i just reached the end of some sort of a road ah this must be the road that it's telling me to take oh may as well not doing anything later this road also looks very infrequently traveled oh wow there it is that's so good google says this is a road google you're just so wrong got some interesting smoky sunrise colors going on over there oh i just bottomed out there's some very deep tire grooves it's all just dust this place is so dusty oh i need momentum oh come on baby [Music] oh what have we here so i am right here on this peninsula and the boat's probably around right here right now so it's probably just blocked by some hills i just hiked up this little hill and i was able to get some telemetry signal the boat's still pretty far back that way so i'm just going to hang out here and wait for it to show up amazing i'm able to pick up a little bit of fpv signal from here so that's kind of cool i'm gonna throw the mavic up and get some aerial shots [Music] [Applause] a little bow i hold a big journey headed south on banks lake 3 30 a.m [Music] little motors big dreams 60 amp hours in the batteries [Music] are you ready the people marked you often but now's your time to shine make the people notice and hold your power up high so the world can see what a great boat you are so the world can see what a great boat this is [Music] maybe they'll stop judging and let you live [Music] [Applause] [Music] from the mavic we were clearly able to see the seaweed hanging off the motor so we got to fix that i feel like there's a shortcut here from the looks of it this road just kind of disappears up ahead yup not much of a road here boy oh boy i just found the sunrise damn [Music] wow i'm not kidding about this no road thing there is like actually no road i'm in like four foot grass oh but there's the road [Music] it's a pretty neat place okay i'm going to stop here to see if i can find the uh fudge we have a motorboat out there it should be coming oh i see it i see it i see it okay i'm gonna figure out if there's a place that i can uh stop it here and pull the seaweed off this could be the first potential collision the camera wouldn't focus but that boat drove right by it that's funny okay so to do this i need to turn on the remote controller and then toggle the mode switch and let's see if this changes to manual mode right now it's an auto nope so that means that i don't have radio signal you try this again facing the boat huh maybe i can try putting it in oh now it's in manual mode what the heck now i'm just uh driving it here just through mission planner looking at the heading that is a bummer that i had to interrupt the autonomous mission but i think it's best to remove that seaweed incoming ditch this run out and grab it before it hits the rocks oh yeah there's seaweed there for sure just a little bit not even that much probably would have been fine but best to get rid of that oh wait there's seaweed tied up in the props that's not great okay got it cleared off bye there's boats out there though i'm kind of concerned about those now so i need to now tell the boat to go back out towards its main route why because if it goes straight to the next waypoint it might hit those two islands out there this water is so warm i want to swim we got a bogey okay i think it's far enough out to put it into auto mode yep auto okay it went good way point number 11 i think that's probably way point eleven yep that's way 0.11 okay cool so it's heading straight there it should just miss that little island so we'll just keep going and hope that fishermen don't mess with it i'm pretty tempted to go jump off those rocks over there but it's also six in the morning so i should probably save that for later if i turn this off the boat just doesn't care it just keeps going lately i've been accumulating a lot of autonomous boats see like over here we have the banana slug over here we have the autonomous solar-powered catamaran a little thing you haven't seen yet got the ground effects vehicle over here all these are the pinnacle of naval 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what's happening around the clock setting it up was super easy and only took minutes visit simplysafe.com rc test flight to learn more and to get at least 30 off your simply safe security system now back to the video oh boy looks like there's a lot of people going fishing oh and i see my boat out there flashing that's hilarious i hear a boat coming towards it i'll go see if there's going to be a collision i think from afar people just assume it's like a kayaker or something yeah they passed it oh they were even pretty close to it so that is some sort of like an island kind of state park thing over there but i don't think i'll be able to get on top of that butte so i think my next move is to drive around to the other side of it and hope to get a view as it goes around the other side right there is where i just took the seaweed off and now we are there this is all just so weird it's like apocalyptic chasing a drone boat what am i doing it's called steamboat rock state park that's where i'm heading i have not received any telemetry data in a while and i think i'm not going to for quite a while longer because the boat is on the other side of that big butte over there or i guess that is the steamboat rock i'm not feeling very confident about this place i don't think i'll be able to get over to the other side of the rock to get line of sight to the boat but i'm really surprised at how many people are camping here like especially for a weekday this place is lit what do these people even do all day i guess beer and boats oh my god there's santa claus on a bicycle holy cow oh they got peacocks and deer that's pretty cool look at that there's a whole herd oh there's a peacock going crazy is that a peacock or a turkey i don't know i'm just searching for a little blip of telemetry data that's all i want and no telemetry data i think this is the single most remote section of the mission where i just don't have any communication to the boat and it's just out of line of sight fingers crossed it makes it through oh yeah leftover burrito for breakfast um i just stood up here on my car to get the antennas up higher and the position jumped ahead so we made it to the other side of steamboat rock and now we're coming this way so this is great i'm just gonna hang out here for a bit and kind of monitor it and then figure out where i'm gonna go next i don't see it but apparently it's out there somewhere i'm kind of suspicious that that boat is following my boat or something i found it it really snuck by me i was looking more towards the north but it's like way towards the west damn there it is blinking along so i just started heading to the next viewpoint still have telemetry data i'm just going to be kind of paralleling the lake for a while still bottoming out on these crappy dirt roads but i think once i get out of here there will be no more dirt it'll just be all paved so that'll be nice i think i'm stuck oh it's too dusty i don't even have a shovel what the am i doing oh my god holy this is like this dust is like so thick it's like quicksand dry quicksand holy oh boy this is just a disaster and then i was definitely scraping along this is crazy i've never seen dust like this what if the boat beats me to the final location oh my god that what oh geez i'm look at this it's like a there's literally just like silt it's just moon dust it's a foot deep this is the problem it's just nice entered okay i'm gonna be digging here for a while at least it's super easy to dig i've been digging out the wheels but i realized that the problem is that the differentials are high centered on the middle of the road so what i should really be doing is putting stuff under the wheels to try and get the car to lift itself out okay got some branches under there not super hopeful about this but let's try it out i'm so it's not going anywhere hi sorry i think the call failed i just barely have cell service i can send somebody up there the only issue is it'd be a few hours or so you're about 87 miles away from us well i can't find any tow trucks within like 60 miles so i'm gonna run back to that campsite and look for someone with a with a big truck and a good heart i put the boat into hold mode which basically just turns off the motors and it just sits there my thought is that it'll just save as much battery as possible and once i get unstuck i can go look for the telemetry signal and hunt it back down i feel very fortunate that i was able to put the boat in hold mode i just barely had a telemetry signal it was probably several miles away at that point my bid to find a big truck and a kind heart has been unsuccessful so i walked through that entire campsite and only found one truck with a winch so those guys were nice enough to drive all the way out there and we brought a shovel and some boards and a jack and they were not able to get the truck with the winch close enough to my truck to tow it out because there's just too much of that silty stuff for too long on the road and i'm like right in the middle of all of it so it can't get close enough but i was actually able to dig it out with the shovel that we brought and i moved about 20 feet forward but then just got stuck again [Music] look at that i moved from there to there that's fantastic oh now i'm stuck again but at least i moved a little bit so the guys that are helping me went over there but we can't get through this part of the road because it's too soft um we could drive through the bushes but they didn't want to scratch up the truck so they went around but now the truck isn't moving i see them way down there probably a few hundred yards away um and they're stopped so i feel like the road is bad down there too or something i'm not sure so then we came back here to the ranger station and they know of a tow truck guy in a city that's fairly close to here so he said an hour we'll see how long it actually takes him ah but i feel really lucky because there is absolutely zero wind so i'm just hoping that i can get to the boat before the battery dies because if the battery dies i'm not gonna be able to find it it's gonna be lost forever probably i probably have a a pound of dirt in my lungs now it looks fine so i went for it and turned out to be bad you're not the person you won't be the last yeah i'm sure i'll do about six of them in here yeah the guys they were helping me out they they didn't think a tow truck would be able to get there they thought i would need to find someone with a backhoe or a bulldozer or something oh that was you i was looking at that yep this is right right about where they turned around and then you can see me right down there you just plow through these bushes huh uh i can see you've been here before i'm glad you're very familiar with the spot you're my savior shoot i guess it would have been a lot easier for you if i didn't spend two hours digging myself out to just get further in okay here we go what do you think back up okay here goes nothing okay now i gotta figure out how to turn around we're free honestly i can't believe i made it as far as i did look how much i was dragging all right jeff you saved me thanks a lot we'll have to learn yeah lesson learned not gonna do that again 300 bucks and i have a boat to catch god damn that's the aftermath not so bad hallelujah it connected and it looks like it's still just in loiter mode sitting out here all these hours later which is hilarious it's at 12.75 volts not too bad i might be able to complete the mission imagine that oh oh oh this screen is very hard to see i didn't realize it but it looks like the boat has washed up on the shore there's jeff bye jeff what's that mode hold okay it's in hold mode again i guess i'm gonna try and go rescue the boat from the shore it's probably getting smashed up on the rocks okay the boat is apparently according to the telemetry on the other side of this swamp so now i have to figure out how to get through here this is oh i've just been bushwhacking for the last 30 minutes and it's been awful i don't even know if i can walk in this stuff oh yeah it's fine i really don't want to walk through that swamp so i'm just going to swim out around that peninsula and then maybe drag the boat back over here so that i can uh put it in auto mode again or something i don't know i totally forgot to film when i had it back here but i swam it back crawled through all the mud that's in between here and there that wasn't pleasant and sent it back out now i'm about to put it in auto mode let's see if this works okay so now it's gonna turn towards waypoint 22. the wind is finally picked up but luckily it's a tailwind hallelujah back in business but i'm gonna go clean my hair now i'm definitely gonna get bit by some sort of a komodo dragon now i just have to walk up to the road which is behind that hill jeff the tow truck driver told me that there's a lot of snakes out here so i really dodged a bullet there also look at these cliffs that's awesome they're so big so much dust they're so oh my god how how how does this much dust come into the car i don't understand oh at least i got chicken mush now it's raining everything's gonna turn into mud so i just came a few more miles down the lake to this little boat launch area and i'm gonna wait until i can get a telemetry signal so i am right here at this kind of boat launch area and the banana slug is up there so it would take quite a long time to finish this mission i don't know if i have it in me well i don't know if its batteries will last either so majestic amazing where am i it's so many minutes later and there's still so much dust blowing off my car my boogers are black wow these rocks are sharp way out there and put the mavic up try and get some shots of it [Music] i'm pretty exhausted at this point and it's like six o'clock and we have quite a few more hours to go but on the other hand i just flew the drone out there to look at the boat and everything's perfect so it's just working so well i would hate to cut it short so i'm gonna let it keep going i just want to go to sleep if i just go to the very end of the mission right now i'm gonna be much further away from the boat so it'll be harder to do something if anything goes wrong but i think i might have telemetry data there it's a clear line of sight but it's a lot of miles it's probably like eight miles or so so i just climbed all the way up on top of this hill and we are very close to the end waypoint and unfortunately there's no telemetry kind of want to go find some food life is good i got a burger got a burger down here somewhere and i backtracked a little bit right now i'm like right in here and i'm picking up telemetry signal how about that oh well sitting here is painfully boring so i'm gonna go over to cooley city and see what there is to see it's the city at the end of the lake way down here i'm just wandering around the coulee city rv park it's a much different culture than what i'm used to so i'm down here right now not getting any telemetry signal yet the boat's probably somewhere around this area so i'm just going to go over here to the end point and see if i can pick anything up from there i'm up here on this little hill now and that's the end of the waypoint mission right there suddenly there started to be uh a headwind the wind is coming from this direction now so i hope that doesn't mess with us too much just got a few little telemetry blips the ground speed is down quite a bit which is a little bit concerning we're making progress slowly but surely the boat's going to kind of pass by closer to that campground i'm concerned because the jet skiers might mess with it i don't know we are getting telemetry data at the final location so that's really exciting just waiting for the banana slug to round that corner oh geez the turning path is all over the place screw it this might be a little sketchy but i'm gonna do a little tuning here i just increased the steering gain a little bit since it looks like it's having trouble steering several outputs throttle 1300 baby giving it more juice it's just getting blown further and further off course this is not good [Music] once it got dark we started seeing it and we can't with binoculars you can't see the boat right yeah god is somebody drowning out there their boat do we yeah so it's just like uh like a science project i guess it started at the other side of the lake 30 miles away um it's been going for like 12 hours is it map on the bottom what's it doing nope it's just driving oh oh it's just not tournament just driving itself just driving itself yeah just to kind of see if it's possible how big is it um it's about four feet long what college is this for ah no college just for fun i'm just a nerd i just realized i've totally been training for this on that really stormy day back on lake washington when the boat was having trouble turning into the wind i increased the minimum air propeller throttle so the air propeller would never fully turn off when it was turning because for whatever reason sometimes when the boat was turning the air propeller would turn off and it gets a lot of turning authority from that so i increased the minimum pwm so that it never turns off i don't think it's helping us hold a perfect course because it's still zigzagging all over the place but it's able to turn into the wind now so that's really good god what a way to finish the mission this is brutal the boat's making progress but the wind is also picking up so i'm pretty concerned no silly robots always doing wacky stuff i'm getting very restless throttle right max one seven zero zero seven zero zero more chooch more power just a little bit further you can do it i've never been so happy to see an inanimate object no no this way come over here a little bit further a little bit further i don't want to get my feet wet come here oh oh ah so close i i have shoes on first observations we got some seaweed in the propellers for sure that was probably reducing the thrust the gopro is still taking pictures one every five seconds i'll cut that ooh this probably slowed it down a lot wow look at that the paint is peeling off gnarly that's the that's the whole bottom right there when it washed ashore today i only noticed this one i didn't notice that the whole bottom was coming off oh my god i can't believe it's back oh i'm so happy okay i want to look inside it okay so i had a bunch of recycling garbage in here so that if it sank it wouldn't sink yeah there's a little water in there i've never had water get in there but when it's in the water for 14 hours or however long it was in there i'm sure it's gonna happen well that was a day that was definitely full of type two fun at some parts it was awful and i was like what am i doing with my life but i'm sure when i look back at it in the future i'll be like oh yeah good times but i'm just happy to get this thing back and then we completed the mission only cheated twice so good okay i'm gonna go to bed so hard now i just need to inflate that ultra dusty air mattress okay that's all for this video that was a big one thanks for watching bye

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 323,177

Keywords: RC, model, boat, ship, autonomous, autopilot, long range, mission, waypoint, GPS, Ardupilot, ardurover

Id: 90N8w69Sqlk

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/iownaredball]

That was fun!

[u/thegodofmeso]

Well that was unexpectedly fun. Thanks

[u/[deleted]]

“What college is this for?”

“No college. I’m just a nerd.”

[u/feloniusfunk]

It’s the HSS Banana Slug!

[u/signori22]

Please don't send it to us in Philadelphia. You won't get it back.

[u/thx1138-]

Hey its rcstestflight, been watching this guy's videos for a while, he always has great stuff and very cool ideas. Definitely learn a lot from his work. I loved that recent one where he teamed up with another guy to make an autonomous ekranoplan!

[u/NZNzven]

God I love the song 🤣

[u/flaker111]

seems like a great way to smuggle drugs if you build enough of them

[u/VediusPollio]

Love it! Thanks for sharing this.