Towards Wireless Controlled Underwater Vehicles

This paper presents adaptation of commercially available Arduino-based LoRa radios for remote wireless command-and-control of a underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The system supports half-duplex communication between the two radios and is capable of remote control of an ROV with a paired down message set. We present our developments to reduce message throughput and the implementation of methods to create a permission-based half-duplex LoRa radio. The system was interfaced with MAVProxy, to support a computer-based ground control station. We present the performance results from our tests in an indoor freshwater tank and the system's capability to wireless control an ROV.