Development of an amphibious mother spherical robot used as the carrier for underwater microrobots

Nowadays, smart materials actuated microrobots are widely used when dealing with complicated missions in limited spaces. But problems still exist in this kind of solutions, such as low locomotion speed and short operating time. To solve these problems, we propose a mother-son multi-robots cooperation system, named GSL system, which included several microrobots as son robots, and a novel designed amphibious spherical robot as the mother robot. The mother robot, called GSLMom, was designed to be able to carry microrobots and provide power supply for them. This paper will talk about the structure and mechanism of the GSLMom robot. The GSLMom robot was designed as an amphibious spherical one. The robot was equipped with a 4 unit locomotion system, and each unit consists of a water-jet propeller and two servo motors. Each servo motor could rotate 90° in horizontal and 120° in vertical direction respectively. When moving in water, servo motors controlled the directions of water jet propellers and the 4 propellers work to actuate the robot. In the ground situation, propellers were used as legs, and servo motors actuated these legs to realize walking mechanism. After discussed structures, experiments were conducted to evaluate performance of the actuators.