We’re going to be putting the breaks on with Quick Tip for Workspace #6. Sorry, I can’t resist a bad joke when given the chance. But seriously, your ROV is an expensive and complex piece of machinery loaded with delicate and (also expensive) sensors. One of your goals during any mission is to keep the ROV safe and to do that you want to avoid running it headlong into a wall or a rock. While Greensea is working on creating obstacle avoidance capabilities, we’re not quite there yet. In the meantime, it’s good to know how to quickly stop your vehicle while you’re running a mission.

While your vehicle is running a mission you are using positioning. The quickest way to stop is to tap your controller. When you do this, you’ll create an active station waypoint at the location of the vehicle and enable Waypoint Hold.

This new waypoint will be a part of the mission, you can use it to control the vehicle to a safe place before you resume the mission.

A quick review of Waypoint Hold. Turning on hold mode doesn’t mean that the vehicle will stop immediately, it means that the vehicle will stop and hold at the current active waypoint. It’ll stay there until either hold mode is disabled or you command the vehicle to go to the next waypoint.

Hold mode means the vehicle will stop and hold at the current active waypoint.

Finally, if you’re in the nightmare scenario of needing to stop and your controller dies, you can disable and re-enable positioning mode. Disabling position mode will have the vehicle stop following waypoints, and re-enabling positioning mode will drop a new station waypoint at the location of the vehicle.

Lost control of controller? Disable then re-enable positioning mode to stop following waypoints.

Keep these in mind when you need to stop your vehicle.