Design, Modeling And Control Of An Amphibious Robot Called Fro Bot

Biomimetic robot is a hotspot of today’s robotics research, people can acquire inspiration from studying the movement patterns and perception of animals. For instance, amphibians are able to move freely in the amphibious environment due to their unique structure and perception. Therefore, the design objective of amphibious robots is supposed to be finding appropriate movement patterns, optimizing mechanical structure and improving sensory ability. This paper describes a novel amphibious robot, which adopts a dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism in the amphibious environment. An unusual universal wheel structure is used to generate propulsion on land, while a pair of flexible caudal fins functions like the foot flippers of a frog to generate similar propulsion underwater.The robot is called Fro Bot, since its structure and locomotion are similar to frogs. This paper introduces the design, modeling and control of the robot and analyses the novel dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism in detail. The main research contents and achievements mainly are as follows:Firstly, the structure of Frobot is introduced detailedly, just like the design of the unusual universal wheel, the caudal fin, the pectoral fin, the front rudder and the dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism.Secondly, based on the ADAMS virtual prototype technology, the locomotion of the robot on land is analysed to understand the kinematics characteristic of the robot. Then, the Fuzzy PID controller is used to realize the control of the velocity of the robot aimed at the strongly nonlinearity of the system.Thirdly, the model of the underwater locomotion of the robot is established, and the ANSYS FLUENT software of finite element analysis is used to conduct computational fluid dynamics(CFD) simulation of Frobot meanwhile, including propulsion simulation, resistance simulation and the attitude control simulation.Finally, the optimization design of the structure of Frobot is carried out based on the simulation and experiment results, and also some constructive improvement plan is proposed.This paper introduces the design, modeling and control of the robot and analyses the novel dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism in detail, and analyses the novel dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism. The optimization design of the structure of Frobot is also carried out.