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UnderwaterRobot

It’s never too late.
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Bio-mimic Underwater Robot

Many kinds of biomimetic fish-like robots are actively researched worldwide for practical use. However, there are still various problems regarding the use of robotic fish in real environments such as rivers for monitoring water pollution. Therefore, the project mainly aimed to develop a robotic fish called 'Ichthus' that can be used for a watercourse quality sensing system. The robotic fish 'Ichthus' has a 3-DOF serial link mechanism for its propulsion, which has been developed at KITECH. Several sensors have been added to enable autonomous navigation in real environments like rivers. An experimental setup has been developed to measure the propulsion force of the robot and three types of sensors have been installed to detect the temperature, electric conductivity, and pH (hydrogen ion concentration) of water. Consequently, the developed robotic system can be applied to an environmental monitoring system to detect pollution or assess the quality of rivers, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Underwater Robot


Targets

In this project, the overall goal was the development of a biomimetic underwater robot platform which includes a swimming mechanism to monitor the condition of watercourses (rivers). The biomimetic underwater robot platform has to move up/down, turn right/left, avoid obstacles, and stay at the local position. When it detects threatening conditions in the watercourses, it immediately informs the central tower about the status of the rivers.

Responsible

  1. Mechanism design of the underwater robot and development
    • Developed a mechanism for generating the thrust force using the tail fin.
    • Designed a waterproof mechanism.
    • Optimized and integrated design for a limited volume of the underwater robot.
  2. Design of docking station
    • For autonomous robot maintenance and wireless communication between the robot and central control.
    • For the automated docking and charging the battery on the robot and releasing the robot.

Achievements

In this research, a robotic fish ‘ICHTHUS’ is developed with its main components in the point of design and control as shown in Figure 2. The developed robotic fish has several types of embedded sensors to navigate autonomously in the real environments like a river. Also, additional three types of sensors are integrated to measure temperature, electric conductivity and the pH of water for monitoring the quality of watercourses to prevent pollution. Since we conducted parameter optimization within this research and confirmed that the optimized input value that can produce faster velocity with smaller torque value, we can improve the energy efficiency and operating time of the robotic fish by applying this result. Also, our robotic fish can navigate in the real environment. Localization and point-based autonomous navigation are successfully achieved while avoiding unknown obstacles in the field. The docking station was also developed that provides robot maintenance, and informs the condition of water at the rivers. The docking station automatically charges the robotic fish, and released. It is shown in the Figure 3.

Figure 2. Implementation of the underwater robot, Version 3

Figure 3. The underwater robot, Version 5

Figure 4. Docking station for the underwater robot 

Refereces

  1. Control and design of a 3 DOF fish robot ‘ICHTUS’. Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 2108-2113.
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