Research For A Jellyfish-Like Robot

The 21st century is a century of ocean. With the increasing need of ocean exploration and development of techniques, many underwater robots have been developed for various unstructured environment. The research on biomimetic microrobot, which has many characteristics such as high efficiency, excellent maneuverability, low noise and less disturbance to the environment, has important application prospects in the field of ocean observation, environmental monitoring and military. This work is supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China.In this paper, we take the jellyfish as a mimetic object and develop a jellyfish-like underwater microrobot through observation and bionic study. A combined driving mechanism of SMA and ICPF is designed for the main structure. Based on the analysis of kinematics and optimization of structure parameters, a dynamic model which illustrates the relation of deformation and outpur force of SMA is built. By analyzing the bending deflection of bindiny mechanism of cantilever structure, we can calculate a cubage change inside the microrobot when SMA is shrinking. And we established the dynamic model of the microrobot. We deduced a relation between deformation of SMA and its propulsion force. According to the characteristic of movement of the microrobot, we designed a hardware driving module for SMA based on AVR microcontroller and ICPF driving module, and established the hardware platform of the entire propulsion system.At the end of this paper, we established the experimental platform to test the driving performance and the propulsion performance of the jellyfish-like microtobot. After all of this, we can comfirm the feasibility of our design.