3D printing technology-based an amphibious spherical robot

Yanlin He, Shuxiang Guo, Liwei Shi*, Shaowu Pan, Zhe Wang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

32 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

It has long been recognized that the employment of underwater robots have important practical significance, which includes pipe survey, oceanic search, under-ice exploration, mine reconnaissance, dam inspection, ocean survey and so on. Owing to the limitation of underwater environment, some regular sized robots are not suitable for limited spaces. Thus some micro-robots appeared, while sacrificed important abilities such as locomotion velocity and enduring time to achieve compact sizes. Then a mother-son robot system was proposed in our previous researches, which included several micro-robots as sons and an amphibious spherical robot as the mother. The mother robot was adopted to make up for the shortages of microrobots. This paper mainly focused on the structure and mechanism of the mother robot. The mother robot was designed with a spherical structure, which was composed of a fixed hemisphere hull and two operable quarter spherical hulls. It was actuated by four water-jet propellers and ten servomotors, capable of moving on land and in underwater environment. We developed a prototype and evaluated its walking and swimming motions in our previous experiments. Due to some problems in the process of assembly, the motion stability and reliability performed not so well. So, in this paper, we improved the structure and mechanism of the robot based on 3D Printing, which could eliminate some manufacture difficulties, shorten the production cycle, improve water-tightness, and enhance the robot's overall stability, compactness and aesthetics.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2014 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, IEEE ICMA 2014
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages1382-1387
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)9781479939787
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Event11th IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, IEEE ICMA 2014 - Tianjin, China
Duration: 3 Aug 20146 Aug 2014

Publication series

Name2014 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, IEEE ICMA 2014

Conference

Conference11th IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, IEEE ICMA 2014
Country/TerritoryChina
CityTianjin
Period3/08/146/08/14

Keywords

  • 3D printing
  • Amphibious quadruped robot
  • Bio-mimetic underwater robot
  • Mother-son robot system
  • Spherical robot
  • Water-jet propeller

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of '3D printing technology-based an amphibious spherical robot'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this