AquaBox Series: Small Underwater Robot Systems for Shallow Water Observation

Abstract

Various kinds of robots have been developed parallel with the progress of computers and information processing technology, and the operations in the extreme environments, such as disaster areas, space and ocean, are getting one of the practical solutions for those hazardous missions. The underwater robots are one of the extreme environment robots and expected as one of solutions for underwater activities, i.e. maintenance of underwater structures, observations, scientific research, where research area is getting wide and deep and also underwater structures are getting large-scale and deep depth. Their efficiencies have been investigated during recent decades and are proven by ocean experiments. However, the robotic system including the support vessels is still big scale, and not so easy to handle by a few researchers. In this paper, we describe the underwater robot "AquaBox" series developed aiming at handy, small underwater robots which can be operated by a few researchers.