Bionic Gliding Underwater Robots

Underwater robots play a significant role in ocean exploration. This book provides full coverage of the theoretical and practical aspects of bionic gliding underwater robots, including system design, modeling control, and motion planning. To overcome the inherent shortcomings of traditional underwater robots that can simultaneously lack maneuverability and endurance, a new type of robot, the bionic gliding underwater robot, has attracted much attention from scientists and engineers. On the one hand, by imitating the appearance and swimming mechanisms of natural creatures, bionic gliding underwater robots achieve high maneuverability, swimming efficiency, and strong concealment. On the other hand, borrowing from the buoyancy adjustment systems of underwater gliders, bionic gliding underwater robots can obtain strong endurance, which is significant in practical applications. Taking gliding robotic dolphin and fish as examples, the designed prototypes and proposed methods are discussed, offering valuable insights into the development of next-generation underwater robots that are well suited for various oceanic applications. This book will be of great interest to students and professionals alike in the field of robotics or intelligent control. It will also be a great reference for engineers or technicians who deal with the development of underwater robots.

This book provides a comprehensive coverage on robot fish including design, modeling and optimization, control, autonomous control and applications. It gathers contributions by the leading researchers in the area. Readers will find the book very useful for designing and building robot fish, not only in theory but also in practice. Moreover, the book discusses various important issues for future research and development, including design methodology, control methodology, and autonomous control strategy. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the fields of robotics, ocean engineering and related areas.

In this book, the authors first introduce two fish-like underwater robots, including a multiple fins-actuated robotic fish and a caudal fin-actuated robotic fish with a barycenter regulating mechanism. They study how a robotic fish uses its onboard pressure sensor arrays based-ALLS to estimate its trajectory in multiple locomotions, including rectilinear motion, turning motion, ascending motion, and spiral motion. In addition, they also explore the ALLS-based relative position and attitude perception between two robotic fish in a leader-follower formation. Four regression methods—multiple linear regression methods, support vector regressions, back propagation neural networks, and random forest methods—are used to evaluate the relative positions or attitudes using the ALLS data. The research on ALLS-based local sensing between two adjacent fish robots extends current research from one individual underwater robot to two robots in formation, and will attract increasing attention from scholars of robotics, underwater technology, biomechanics and systems, and control engineering.

In this book, the authors first introduce two fish-like underwater robots, including a multiple fins-actuated robotic fish and a caudal fin-actuated robotic fish with a barycenter regulating mechanism. They study how a robotic fish uses its onboard pressure sensor arrays based-ALLS to estimate its trajectory in multiple locomotions, including rectilinear motion, turning motion, ascending motion, and spiral motion. In addition, they also explore the ALLS-based relative position and attitude perception between two robotic fish in a leader-follower formation. Four regression methods—multiple linear regression methods, support vector regressions, back propagation neural networks, and random forest methods—are used to evaluate the relative positions or attitudes using the ALLS data. The research on ALLS-based local sensing between two adjacent fish robots extends current research from one individual underwater robot to two robots in formation, and will attract increasing attention from scholars of robotics, underwater technology, biomechanics and systems, and control engineering.

Robots can be sent to the most extreme environments in the world. This book takes readers on a deep-sea dive to find out all about underwater robots. Readers will learn about the history of robot technology, as well as the latest uses for underwater robots. The accessible language describes how robots work, while color photographs bring readers into the underwater environments where some robots do their job. What’s the future of underwater robots? What can we find out by using them? This book answers these questions and many more, as readers follow robots under the sea.

This book reports on the latest advances in the study of motion control in biomimetic swimming robots with high speed and high manoeuvrability. It presents state-of-the-art studies on various swimming robots including robotic fish, dolphins and jellyfish in a unified framework, and discusses the potential benefits of applying biomimetic underwater propulsion to autonomous underwater vehicle design, such as: speed, energy economy, enhanced manoeuvrability, and reduced detectability. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to researchers, engineers and graduate students in robotics and ocean engineering who wish to learn about the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of biomimetic underwater robots.

Visual Perception and Control of Underwater Robots covers theories and applications from aquatic visual perception and underwater robotics. Within the framework of visual perception for underwater operations, image restoration, binocular measurement, and object detection are addressed. More specifically, the book includes adversarial critic learning for visual restoration, NSGA-II-based calibration for binocular measurement, prior knowledge refinement for object detection, analysis of temporal detection performance, as well as the effect of the aquatic data domain on object detection. With the aid of visual perception technologies, two up-to-date underwater robot systems are demonstrated. The first system focuses on underwater robotic operation for the task of object collection in the sea. The second is an untethered biomimetic robotic fish with a camera stabilizer, its control methods based on visual tracking. The authors provide a self-contained and comprehensive guide to understand underwater visual perception and control. Bridging the gap between theory and practice in underwater vision, the book features implementable algorithms, numerical examples, and tests, where codes are publicly available. Additionally, the mainstream technologies covered in the book include deep learning, adversarial learning, evolutionary computation, robust control, and underwater bionics. Researchers, senior undergraduate and graduate students, and engineers dealing with underwater visual perception and control will benefit from this work.

All life came from sea but all robots were born on land. The vast majority of both industrial and mobile robots operate on land, since the technology to allow them to operate in and under the ocean has only become available in recent years. A number of complex issues due to the unstructured, hazardous undersea environment, makes it difficult to travel in the ocean while today's technologies allow humans to land on the moon and robots to travel to Mars . . Clearly, the obstacles to allowing robots to operate in a saline, aqueous, and pressurized environment are formidable. Mobile robots operating on land work under nearly constant atmospheric pressure; their legs (or wheels or tracks) can operate on a firm footing; their bearings are not subjected to moisture and corrosion; they can use simple visual sensing and be observed by their creators working in simple environments. In contrast, consider the environment where undersea robots must operate. The pressure they are subjected to can be enormous, thus requiring extremely rugged designs. The deep oceans range between 19,000 to 36,000 ft. At a mere 33-foot depth, the pressure will be twice the normal one atmosphere pressure of 29. 4 psi. The chemical environment of the sea is highly corrosive, thus requiring the use of special materials. Lubrication of moving parts in water is also difficult, and may require special sealed, waterproof joints.