First Autonomous Boat on Raspberry Pi B+

Hello everyone,

I’m new to this community and would really appreciate some guidance! I am building a USV/autonomous marine boat and planning on using a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with two Blue Robotics T200 thrusters in a differential steering set-up.

I’ve been reading through the forums for newbies here and the basic build document here. I see that everyone says to use a flight controller (Pixhawk, BeagleBone Blue, etc). Can someone explain to me why that is? I built an autonomous car using the Donkey Car open-source code as part of a class, and we only used the Raspberry Pi and a PWM.

Thanks for the help!

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normaly you have a low level control (arudpilot running on pixhawk hardware) and a high level control (ros on whatever hardware with linux).

low level hardware is very important for safety reasons.
what if your high level system is crashing? no failsave.
also the highlevel system is no real time. too slow for real time tasks.

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How did this go @saakib.akbany ?
I’m in almost the exact same situation. I have access to a raspberry pi 3 B, 2 servos and a DC motor and I am going to make a boat using these things and would love to use ardupilot (since all the youtube videos showcase that it totally works) but I’m having a hard time setting it up. I made a post about it here: Loading firmware to raspberry pi 3 B without existing firmware (first time)

How did this go for you?