Experiments and characteristics analysis of a bio-inspired underwater microrobot

Nowadays, studies of the biomimetic microrobots with multi DOF that can walk and swim smoothly in water or aqueous medium have been hot topics in the field of underwater monitoring operations, including pollution detection, video mapping and other tasks. Actuator materials of all types are of interest for any application where space is limited. This constraint certainly applies to the small-scale crawling and swimming robot, where multiple small actuators are needed for forward/backward propulsion, steering and diving/surfacing. In this paper, in order to resolve the problems of asymmetry in previous developed crawling microrobot, we have proposed a new type of underwater microrobot using 8 pieces of IPMC actuators as legs. In addition, we evaluated the bending characteristic of IPMC actuator and analyzed the dynamic performance of walking and rotating motions. Then, the theoretical walking and rotating speeds are carried out. Also, we developed a prototype of the biomimetic underwater microrobot. In the following, some experiments were carried out to evaluate the walking and rotating speeds. The experimental results indicate the simulation results are coincident with the experimental results in trend, though some errors still exist. At last, we applied some actual payload on the developed microrobot to evaluate its locomotion speeds.