Sonar for obstacle avoidance?

Hi.

I have been diving in the wiki and came across underwater sonars for obstacle avoidance. They are cheap, long range, doesn’t require a companion computer etc. Sounds too good to be true. Do they actually work for obstacle avoidance? Anyone here using one of the sonars in the wiki that could share his/her experience? :slight_smile:

what are you trying to avoid? is it objects under the boat or objects infront of the boat? what sonar are you looking at?

ardurover will treat sonars the same if the are above or below the water, its just a directional rangefinder as far as its concerned. that being said there has not been much testing in this area so far so it would be interesting to see what results you get.

I have a high interest in this subject, I see huge application for it and for me. I use my jon boat early morning like 4am to duck hunt. I’ve been looking into this myself. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

There is a couple of options, one is multiple sonars in multiple directions that is probably the simplest way to do it but also the most expensive.

The other would be to rotate the sonar and scan around the boat. Its not that hard, you just need to use my rotating rangefinder lua script and a servo to be able to turn the rangefinder.