Extending PX4's Underwater Robot Support

Hi all,

quite some time ago we added the underwater drone HippoCampus to the PX4 firmware incl. sitl_gazebo support. Unfortunately, it is still based on the multicopter airframe.

I am currently working on making it finally independent from MC, especially by providing an independent underwater drone / boat airframe and building a proper attitude controller.

Before reaching out with a pull request for this feature and just updating the the old HippoCampus files, the corresponding sitl_gazebo module has to be adapted/added.

As these are two repositories I was wondering what is the best way to proceed?

Thanks
Daniel

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Hi Daniel.
I’m using Px4 1.10 and this is exactly what I am trying to do… disassociate MC for use in an underwater drone, though I seem to be quite a few steps behind you. So glad to hear that I’m not the only one working on this. I have had a hard time getting HippoCampus to work in any regard and was beginning to wonder how much support for it PX4 actually has. As a result, I’ve been compiling as a quad copter and trying to modify PX4 starting from there. When I run make list_config_targets, I don’t see a way to build HippoCampus (which is why I went back to the drawing board and tried to start with a copter configuration.) Can you point me a better direction? How can I make use of anything that’s already part of PX4 for underwater drones? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve

@DanielDuecker Awesome! You can create a PR on both repositories and reference the PRs to each other in the description

okay, will do!

however, I have to do some code clean up beforehand…

Hi Steve,

it is not merged into master. You coul run it by make px4_sitl gazebo_uuv_hippocampus
However, for sitl_gazebo the PR is still pending so you need to use the uuv_extension branch for the moment.

If you have any questions, drop me a message!

Daniel