Abstract
Multibody marine robots, representing a promising research and development area, have gained acute attention and response from civil and military fields. A multibody marine robot is a multibody system composed of multiple single-body marine robots (defined as a unit) in a certain topology. Such a system is generally characterized by underactuation, hyperredundancy, power distribution, modularization and so on. Compared with traditional single-body marine robots, multibody marine robots can carry greater loads and have more forms of motion, so they can meet more specialized functional requirements. At the same time, they also have more complex hydrodynamic characteristics due to their unique structures and motion forms. In this paper, the types, features, and hydrodynamic characteristics of typical multibody marine robots are reviewed and summarized based on the connection structures between units. In addition, the development trends of multibody marine robots are analyzed and discussed. This review work anticipates positive attention from future readers regarding multibody marine robots, which represent an important subarea of marine robots.
Highlights
With the rapid development of science and technology, unmanned marine robots have been widely used in civil fields such as marine environment observation [1], deep sea mineral resource exploitation [2], and seabed geomorphology [3]
Marine robots can be divided into single-body and multibody marine robots
Multibody marine robots can be divided into serial-like multibody systems, tree-like multibody systems, closed-loop multibody systems, and hybrid multibody systems according to their topology [15]
Summary
With the rapid development of science and technology, unmanned marine robots have been widely used in civil fields such as marine environment observation [1], deep sea mineral resource exploitation [2], and seabed geomorphology [3]. The single-body autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is widely used because of its high speed and wide detection range [5]. It can perform analysis, decision-making and collaboration tasks autonomously by carrying different sensors. Multibody marine robots, composed of multiple isomorphic or heterogeneous single-body marine robots in a certain topology, are multibody systems [14] They can be categorized as rigid multibody systems, flexible multibody systems and rigid-flexible hybrid multibody systems according to the type of units. Multibody marine robots can be divided into serial-like multibody systems, tree-like multibody systems, closed-loop multibody systems, and hybrid multibody systems according to their topology [15] They generally exhibit characteristics of underactuation, hyperredundancy, distributed propulsion, and modular structure. This paper will provide researchers with more detailed information on the current state of technological development of multibody marine robots
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