Mechatronic design of a miniature underwater robot for swarm operations

Abstract

Due to extreme and unpredictable conditions, oceanic missions are still a persistent challenge in robotics. With the aim of improving decision autonomy and robustness against unforeseen circumstances, the EU-funded CoCoRo project is developing a cognitive swarm of underwater robots. Swarm and cognition algorithms will be studied and validated with a large number of miniaturized and affordable AUVs, named Jeff, whose custom mechanical design is described in this paper. Jeff is conceived for high-mobility in 3D cluttered environments and has distributed sensors for multi-directional perception and communication. The propulsion and the buoyancy systems are designed with watertight and energetically efficient solutions to improve system reliability and energetic autonomy. The manuscript also describes the design of a docking system that allows Jeff to passively align and connect to a submerged docking station for battery charging.

Review on Unmanned Underwater Robotics, Structure Designs, Materials, Sensors, Actuators, and Navigation Control

“…e magnetometer works by measuring the magnetic field variation in three referential axes that are subtracted from the Earth's magnetic field; despite its wide applications on the UUV development field, the operation of this sensor is sensitive to the noise caused by other sources like the operation of other sensors, motors, and others. is means that you cannot only rely on the values of a magnetometer, as there are also several parts to be considered in underwater navigation such as a pressure sensor to measure depth, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer to control altitude and locomotion [45].…”

Vertex: A New Distributed Underwater Robotic Platform for Environmental Monitoring

“…The solutions to these prerequisites were individually evaluated, but the project concluded before a large-scale swarm could be built. The CoCoRo project succeeded in building a large underwater swarm [16], but was clearly focused on indoor in-vitro experimentation [10]. The AUVs in that project have a very limited endurance and depth capability, are not suitable for outdoor use and were not designed to carry a useful payload.…”

A Pheromone-Inspired Monitoring Strategy Using a Swarm of Underwater Robots

“…As a result, current underwater multi-robot systems usually contain a limited number of robots [12]. In [13], the swarm consists of a larger amount of robots, but it fails to cover an extensive region due to the limitation of adopted optical communication.…”

“…When it comes to marine environmental and hazards monitoring, an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) swarm has been widely adopted [16,17,18,19,20]. Underwater robot swarms have been attracting much interest recently, such as the COCORO [13,21] and MONSUN-II projects for swarm missions [22].…”