Research On Variable Configuration Soft Bionic Underwater Robot

With the increasing demand for earth resources and the development of research on biological species,the exploration and exploitation of marine resources,the observation and research of underwater organisms are more extensive.Therefore,the development of underwater robots is greatly promoted.At present,most of the bionic underwater robots are still rigid structure,which has the problems of large noise,large disturbance,poor flexibility and so on.In view of the above situation,a kind of soft bionic underwater robot with variable configuration is proposed.In this paper,the main structure of the reconfigurable underwater robot is cownose ray,and the secondary structure is Carangidae fish.Among them,the robot's base structure,actuator and variable configuration scheme are all made of flexible materials and pneumatically driven.Through the research of the bionic object,the variable configuration scheme is designed to make the prototype change from horizontal flat to lateral flat,and the propulsion mode change from pectoral fin propulsion to tail fin propulsion.In order to achieve the flexibility of the actuator,a new type of pneumatic bending actuator is proposed in this paper.Through the theoretical analysis of the structure and the static performance test of the actuator,the influence of different structural parameters on the bending performance is obtained,and the structural parameters suitable for the use of pectoral fin and tail fin are designed.Then the control system of bionic fish is built,including three aspects: hardware system,software system and control strategy.The hardware system mainly includes pneumatic platform and control circuit.The control strategy is used to control the speed,direction and depth of underwater vehicle motion performance experiment.In order to test the swimming feasibility of the bionic fish,a prototype experiment platform of the bionic fish was established.Aiming at the performance parameters such as the swing frequency and swing amplitude of the pectoral fin and tail fin of the bionic fish,the effects of different parameters in the two configurations on the motion speed and direction were studied through experiments,which proved the feasibility of the propulsion mode of the bionic fish with variable configuration.