Design and Control of a Novel Bionic Mantis Shrimp Robot

Abstract

This article presents the development of a novel bionic robot, which is inspired by agile and fast mantis shrimp in the ocean. The developed bionic mantis shrimp robot has ten rigid-flexible swimming feet (pleopods) for swimming propulsion and a rope-driven spine for its body bending. By studying the motion trajectory of biological mantis shrimp, the kinematic gait planning of the bionic pleopod is completed and the central pattern generator controller of the bionic mantis shrimp robot applicable to the coupled motion of multiple pleopods is proposed. The controller is experimentally verified to effectively simulate the swimming motion of mantis shrimp, which enables the robot to reach a maximum swimming velocity of 0.28 m/s (0.46 body length per second) and a minimum turning radius of 0.36 m.The influence of control parameters on the robot's swimming performance is then investigated. Experiments are conducted to show that the oscillation frequency of the bionic pleopod plays a major positive role in the robot's swimming speed. This article has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism design and motion control method for a bionic mantis shrimp robot and laid the foundation for the further exploration of bionic mantis shrimp robots in rugged seabed environments.