Military EOD ROV — Bangladesh Army

A military-grade Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) for Explosive Ordnance Disposal, engineered for the Bangladesh Army. It combines a custom RS-485 multi-node control bus, real-time multi-axis motion, GPS, a robotic arm, and a 1.4 GHz wireless video link. Four units were delivered and deployed in United Nations operations and with the Peru Army.

EOD robotics is one of the hardest environments for embedded systems. A single chassis packs motors, actuators, multiple sensors, a robotic arm, and a wireless video link — and every subsystem needs coordinated, real-time control while staying reliable in the field, where a dropped message or a stalled node can abort a mission. Off-the-shelf buses could not deliver deterministic, fault-tolerant coordination across all of these nodes at once.

A custom RS-485 multi-node protocol

I designed and implemented a master-slave broadcast protocol on the RS-485 physical layer to coordinate every node from one controller. The controllers are STM32 family:

• Precise timer Scheduling per node, so timing is predictable under load
• Direct Memory Access buffer hits directly to DMA to reduce CPU usages
• CRC-checked broadcast frames for integrity on a noisy field bus
• Graceful degradation when a node drops, instead of a whole-bus failure

Whole-system integration

Around that bus I integrated motor drivers, controllers, and actuators with real-time synchronization, plus GPS, Drive system, a robotic arm,PTZ Cameras, and a 1.4 GHz wireless video link into one field-deployable embedded platform.

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The protocol work was published as the Best Paper at ICCIT 2024, presenting a novel approach to robust field-robotics communication.
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• 4 units delivered for operational deployment
• Deployed in United Nations operations and delivered to the Peru Army
• Officially recognized by the Bangladesh Army
• Protocol published as Best Paper, ICCIT 2024

Add to confirm: number of nodes on the bus, control-loop/poll rate, and video-link range.