Product Description
The Ping360 scanning sonar is a mechanical scanning imaging sonar. It’s designed primarily to be used on the BlueROV2 and other ROVs for navigation in low-visibility water conditions, but it’s also suited for applications such as inspection, obstacle avoidance, target location and tracking, autonomous systems development, and more!
​
What is a Scanning Sonar?
If you’re new to scanning sonars, here’s how it works: inside the Ping360 is an acoustic transducer that sends a narrow beam of acoustic energy into the water and then listens back for echoes. That transducer is mounted to a motor that rotates it in one-degree increments and as it does this it generates a circular image of the sonar’s surroundings with a maximum range of 50 meters (165 feet). The result is similar to what you might see from a weather radar on the local news or a laser scanner on an autonomous robot. Here’s an example of a scan of dock pilings straight ahead of the BlueROV2:
​
User Interface
The Ping360 connects to the open-source Ping-Viewer application for control and data display. Ping-Viewer runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and can connect to the Ping360 through a direct connection to the computer or through the onboard computer on the BlueROV2.
​
For those who wish to integrate the Ping360 scanning sonar into other systems and access the data directly, it communicates with a binary message format called the Ping-Protocol. We have C++, Arduino and Python libraries for the Ping-Protocol to get you up and running almost immediately.
​
Check out the Technical Details below for more information!