Remote Piloting Development of an ROV

This work presents a project that consists of turning a commercial Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) into a Remotely Piloted ROV. It was taken two approaches. First we developed a serial/ethernet converter to transfer data from the hand controller to the ROV control console and vice-versa. In this approach, an ESP32 microcontroller was used to receive serial data in the 9-bit framing protocol and transmit them over a network connection. The reverse operation was carried out on the other side by another ESP32. The second approach was based on replacing the ROV remote control with an Single Board Computer (SBC), whose function was to emulate the signals sent to the ROV by the remote control. It will be presented the development and the achieved results for these two methods.