Research On Bio-inspired Touch Mechanism And Design Method In Underwater Environment

The current techniques of real time flow sensing and detecting in turbid waters are still immature,while it is urgent to make some breakthrough in underwater sensing technologies.There are plenty of turbid waters widely distributed throughout China's offshore and inland areas,where the waters all feature in complicated currents,high turbidity,and various and complex underwater terrains.In these extreme environments,it is fairly difficult for the existing flow-sensing devices to fulfill their functions;humans' and underwater/amphibious robotic devices' abilities are constrained in some special tasks,such as environment inspection,engineering construction,underwater security and safety,and emergency rescue,etc.This thesis is aimed at meeting the demands of flow sensing and underwater target measurement,and achieving the biomimetic touching mechanism through profound studies on the important issues about the low-signal level and the inaccurate flow-direction measurement of the existing biomimetic touching mechanisms and the difficulties in measuring the exact geometry information of the target objects with complex surfaces in underwater environment.The studies in this paper are providing some new methods and ideas on the techniques of detections underwater with hybrid editing on key biomimetic items.This thesis starts with the researches on bionics,and then develops into systematic studies on underwater biomimetic touching mechanism and design method about it,including methods of mechanism innovation by hybrid biomimetic,flow sensing and underwater target detection.Based on the research results in bionics,the paper conducts a comparative analysis of mechanisms and models of biological touch mechanical receptors.New mechanisms are created by combination of features from similarity and specificity obtained through morphology,structure,material and neural perception model.The configuration is selected with constructing mathematic model for function and application.The analysis and optimization are implemented on performance for the new mechanisms,containing the flow measurement range and sensitivity of biomimetic flow sensor,and the detecting space and application environment of active touch sensing mechanism.In the end,all the related experiments are carried out on a specially-constructed underwater platform.The results of experiments display higher level signal for flow sensing,with biomimetic touch sensor able to sense the exact direction and velocity of the flow simultaneously,while the sensitivity and flow measurement range can be regulated,and the active sensing mechanism can capture the geometrical information of objects with complex surfaces in turbid waters.The results further prove that the sensitivity of biomimetic flow sensor can reach up to 0.1 m/s,and the measurement is flexibly adjustable,the plane-direction measuring range can reach 360 degrees,and the precision of active touch sensing of targets underwater can reach 3mm.All the results indicate that the new hybrid biomimetic sensors have a significant application prospect.This paper establishes new theory and method for mechanism innovation based on biomimetic and evaluation model.By studying the touch sensing mechanisms,new design methods and mechanisms of passive and active touching for flow monitoring and underwater detection are created.In summary,the researches in this thesis are of academic and practical values among underwater detection technologies.