Effective control of Aquabot is dependent on high quality and low latency video stream. Several cameras are critical for situational awareness around the ROV when maneuvering and on tooling to ensure error free use.

At present, a prototype streaming system is being configured for use on Linux systems (both the ROV and shore station will be run from Linux machines). The team is writing scripts which implement tools from the gStreamer framework to develop a video pipeline which ensures latency is kept under 200 milliseconds and and at least 720p video.

Latency plays a significant role in the success of an underwater robot; If visual feedback lags user input by up to a third of a second, the operator quickly becomes disoriented and is forced to make predictive inputs which detracts from the precision in controlling the vehicle.

Once we have a prototype streaming capability, the focus will shift to integrating these scripts into a main control software by porting the script commands to an implementation in C.

Griffin testing a gStreamer pipeline with an old webcam.