Experiments in closed-loop control for an underwater eel-like robot

Abstract

We investigate basic issues of motion planning for a class of dynamic mobile robots, focusing on eel-like swimming robots. A primary characteristic of this class of robots is that drift plays a significant role in the generation of motion. We provide a brief summary of our previous work in eel-like robotics, in which we explored generic gait patterns that could be used to drive an eel-like robot. We make an analogy with kinematic car-like robots to develop feedback algorithms to perform trajectory trucking about a nominal path. We use these control laws in closed-loop experiments with an underwater eel-like robot, using a vision based position sensing system to provide feedback.