Underwater robots play a significant role in ocean exploration. This book provides full coverage of the theoretical and practical aspects of bionic gliding underwater robots, including system design, modeling control, and motion planning. To overcome the inherent shortcomings of traditional underwater robots that can simultaneously lack maneuverability and endurance, a new type of robot, the bionic gliding underwater robot, has attracted much attention from scientists and engineers. On the one hand, by imitating the appearance and swimming mechanisms of natural creatures, bionic gliding underwater robots achieve high maneuverability, swimming efficiency, and strong concealment. On the other hand, borrowing from the buoyancy adjustment systems of underwater gliders, bionic gliding underwater robots can obtain strong endurance, which is significant in practical applications. Taking gliding robotic dolphin and fish as examples, the designed prototypes and proposed methods are discussed, offering valuable insights into the development of next-generation underwater robots that are well suited for various oceanic applications. This book will be of great interest to students and professionals alike in the field of robotics or intelligent control. It will also be a great reference for engineers or technicians who deal with the development of underwater robots.

In this book, the authors first introduce two fish-like underwater robots, including a multiple fins-actuated robotic fish and a caudal fin-actuated robotic fish with a barycenter regulating mechanism. They study how a robotic fish uses its onboard pressure sensor arrays based-ALLS to estimate its trajectory in multiple locomotions, including rectilinear motion, turning motion, ascending motion, and spiral motion. In addition, they also explore the ALLS-based relative position and attitude perception between two robotic fish in a leader-follower formation. Four regression methods—multiple linear regression methods, support vector regressions, back propagation neural networks, and random forest methods—are used to evaluate the relative positions or attitudes using the ALLS data. The research on ALLS-based local sensing between two adjacent fish robots extends current research from one individual underwater robot to two robots in formation, and will attract increasing attention from scholars of robotics, underwater technology, biomechanics and systems, and control engineering.

This book provides a comprehensive coverage on robot fish including design, modeling and optimization, control, autonomous control and applications. It gathers contributions by the leading researchers in the area. Readers will find the book very useful for designing and building robot fish, not only in theory but also in practice. Moreover, the book discusses various important issues for future research and development, including design methodology, control methodology, and autonomous control strategy. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the fields of robotics, ocean engineering and related areas.

This book reports on the latest advances in the study of motion control in biomimetic swimming robots with high speed and high manoeuvrability. It presents state-of-the-art studies on various swimming robots including robotic fish, dolphins and jellyfish in a unified framework, and discusses the potential benefits of applying biomimetic underwater propulsion to autonomous underwater vehicle design, such as: speed, energy economy, enhanced manoeuvrability, and reduced detectability. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to researchers, engineers and graduate students in robotics and ocean engineering who wish to learn about the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of biomimetic underwater robots.

All life came from sea but all robots were born on land. The vast majority of both industrial and mobile robots operate on land, since the technology to allow them to operate in and under the ocean has only become available in recent years. A number of complex issues due to the unstructured, hazardous undersea environment, makes it difficult to travel in the ocean while today's technologies allow humans to land on the moon and robots to travel to Mars . . Clearly, the obstacles to allowing robots to operate in a saline, aqueous, and pressurized environment are formidable. Mobile robots operating on land work under nearly constant atmospheric pressure; their legs (or wheels or tracks) can operate on a firm footing; their bearings are not subjected to moisture and corrosion; they can use simple visual sensing and be observed by their creators working in simple environments. In contrast, consider the environment where undersea robots must operate. The pressure they are subjected to can be enormous, thus requiring extremely rugged designs. The deep oceans range between 19,000 to 36,000 ft. At a mere 33-foot depth, the pressure will be twice the normal one atmosphere pressure of 29. 4 psi. The chemical environment of the sea is highly corrosive, thus requiring the use of special materials. Lubrication of moving parts in water is also difficult, and may require special sealed, waterproof joints.

A classic in underwater robotics. One of the first volumes in the “Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics” series, it has been a bestseller through the previous three editions. Fifteen years after the publication of the first edition, the fourth edition comes to print. The book addresses the main control aspects in underwater manipulation tasks. With respect to the third edition, it has been revised, extended and some concepts better clustered. The mathematical model with significant impact on the control strategy is discussed. The problem of controlling a 6-degrees-of-freedoms autonomous underwater vehicle is investigated and a survey of fault detection/tolerant strategies for unmanned underwater vehicles is provided. Inverse kinematics, dynamic and interaction control for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems are then discussed. The code used to generate most of the numerical simulations is made available and briefly discussed.

This book provides a simplified description of how to design an underwater swimming robot, inspired by the mechanism of the Labriform mode of fish. This style of swimming depends on the pectoral fins only as a main locomotor for movement. A unique model with fins having a concave shape allows the highest thrust force to be achieved during the power period and the lowest drag force during the recovery period, especially if the velocity values between the powering and recovery periods are manipulated.Besides the ability to swim quickly, the proposed model was also inspired by a method of maneuvering based on the principle of differential drive for two-wheel mobile robot, achieving the minimum turning radius by controlling the speed of the rowing fins.Also, by applying the technique of the diving model used by gliders, the robot achieves underwater gliding by changing the center of the body's mass. Thus, the robot obtains the ability to dive and float in a manner similar to the Sawtooth wave.All the mentioned tasks were conducted via laboratory experiments and proven to be both effective and efficient.