Underwater Positioning of Multi-legged Subsea Robot for Submarine Exploration Equipment

Abstract

This paper describes underwater positioning of multi-legged walking robot, Crabster200, to improve performance of the exploration equipment. Crabster200 has six legs so that it can crawl on the seafloor such as crabs and lobsters. Using friction force between feet and seabed and Crabster200 can secure stable attitude to explore with sonar equipment. The underwater robot has lots of degree of freedom (DOF) because of legs which has total 24 DOF and it can generate and provide redundancy to the sensors. Also, own position in underwater can be calculated by kinematic relationship among coordinates of legs, body, ground. In this paper, we derived kinematic relationship based on matrices and established simulation program using derived kinematics. We performed simulation and experiments of posture and gait control. Finally, we validate underwater positioning of Crabster200 through the simulations and experiments.ction force between feet and seabed and Crabster200 can secure stable attitude to explore with sonar equipment. The underwater robot has lots of degree of freedom (DOF) because of legs which has total 24 DOF and it can generate and provide redundancy to the sensors. Also, own position in underwater can be calculated by kinematic relationship among coordinates of legs, body, ground. In this paper, we derived kinematic relationship based on matrices and established simulation program using derived kinematics. We performed simulation and experiments of posture and gait control. Finally, we validate underwater positioning of Crabster200 through the simulations and experiments.