Modeling and Experimental Verification of a New Spherical Underwater Robot

Abstract

Underwater robots provide great possibilities for people to detect the marine environment. Robots need to keep moving stability, need to ensure the safety of the robot during the movement. A novel spherical underwater robot (SUR V) with hybrid propulsion devices that divided into two parts- vectored water-jet and propeller thrusters. A camera is added at robot to monitor the environments. To analyze the motion characteristics of the SUR V, the computational simulation is calculated in ADAMS and ANSYS CFX respectively. The simulation results verify the performance of the improved spherical underwater robot. Finally, the thrust experiments were conducted that evaluate the performance of the hybrid thruster. The thrust experiment proves that in the improved hybrid thruster proposed in this paper, the maximum thrust of the propeller thruster has increased by 4 times than before.