Sualtında Manipülasyon İçin İnsansız Robot Mürekkepbalığı Geliştirilmesi ve Tasarımı

Many experts claim that the world is heading for a resource crisis in the next decades. Higher demand on natural resources are forcing policy makers to explore the sustainable exploitation of the vast but mostly untouched oceans and seas The marine environment is the habitat to a diverse ecosystem and plays a vital role in the bio-geo-chemical cycles that help support life on Earth. It is a critical source of food, proteins, hydrocarbons and fossil fuels, alternative energy sources, mines and minerals. There is no doubt that the coming years will see an increase in the human involvement in underwater environments. However, recent catastrophic accidents in the Gulf of Mexico, Italy and Korea have shown very dramatically that we currently lack the necessary robotic tools for successful underwater manipulation and intervention. Since their first deployment in the 1970’s, unmanned underwater vehicles have changed very little. Current worker class remotely operated vehicles (ROV) can host one or two robot arms for underwater manipulation. However, these robots have very little range and the tether that connects the robot to the surface makes navigation difficult. Furthermore, ROV’s have very little, if any, autonomous capabilities which makes simultaneous piloting of the vehicle and operating the robots arms very challenging for the operator. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) on the other hand, are long ranged and fully autonomous underwater robots that lack any sort of underwater manipulation capability. This project aims to fulfil the current gap in existing unmanned underwater vehicle capabilities by developing a novel robot with dexterous underwater manipulation capabilities. The proposed biomimetic robot is inspired by squids that combine a streamlined and agile body with very dexterous and versatile tentacles capable of reaching, grabbing, exploring, and pulling. Furthermore, these tentacles can also be used for other non-traditional forms of locomotion such as crawling on a surface. The squid robot will incorporate a plethora of innovative technologies and approaches not yet implemented in underwater robots. Similar to the squid tentacles, the robot arms will be hyper-redundant links made of soft and very deformable materials. With the compliance provided by the soft material, the robot will be able to better interact with the environment in tasks such as picking and grasping. Furthermore, soft arms also enables the robot to crawl more effectively on uneven surfaces. Two new squid inspired propulsion techniques not found on current UUV’s will be explored. Both the undulating fins used primarily for maneuvering and jet pulses used for propulsion are novel actuation approaches that eliminate the need to have a propeller. Without the propeller, the robot will become a convenient platform for deployment close to the seabed, near underwater structures and in dirty waters. The robot will have teleoperation capabilities. However, to reduce the workload of the operator, primitive behaviors will be automated using the whole body control framework developed for humanoid and legged robots, making it semi-autonomous. The model mediated teleoperation approach is adapted to overcome the risk of encountering communication problems between the robot and the operator. To this end, a virtual environment will be constructed at the operator side through sensory data obtained by the robot. To provide a high bandwidth and high quality communication link between the operator and the robot, a novel visible light based optical communication system will be developed and integrated to the robot. After the development phase, the robot will be tested and evaluated through pool and lake trials.