Rover switches from manual mode to steering mode uncommanded

ArduRover Rover 4.1
1

I’m having an intermittent issue while driving my rover in manual mode: every once in a while, it will switch into ‘steering’ mode apparently by itself. The only other modes I use are auto and hold and those work fine. I’m controlling the vehicle from Mission Planner using an XBox controller as a joystick. The only channels I have configured are steering/‘roll’ and throttle, and I’ve set MODE_CH to -1 to try to rule out the possibility that I’m hitting a button on accident. Is there any action or error that can cause the rover to ‘fault out’ of manual and into steering? I’ve had this same thing happen in Rover 4.0 as well.

Edit: Upon reviewing the logs, it looks like the reason (MODE.Rsn) for the surprise mode changes to steering is given as 1 (RC_COMMAND), and for all the other, intentional mode changes, it’s 2 (GCS_COMMAND). My rover is down with some unrelated mechanical issues at the moment, so I can’t test this, but I’m wondering if this has something to do with my RC_OPTIONS parameter. Should I have bit 1 ‘ignore RC receiver’ set in order to use the joystick instead?

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Hi @AnnaSv,

Good work finding the mode reason in the logs. My guess is that one of the RCx_OPTIONS parameters has been set to 53 (“Steering”) and the RC input (aka “x”) is moving up and down and triggering the mode change.

If there’s a link to the log somewhere I can have a peek.

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Yep, I had RC1_OPTIONS set to 53, probably from when I was trying to set up the joystick controls and failing, haha. Thanks so much! I’ll report back when I have a chance to test it out.

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