Underwater motion characteristics evaluation of multi amphibious spherical robots

Abstract

Information exchanges and cooperative movements of multi robots have become a hot topic in robotics. To improve the performance and working efficiency of our amphibious spherical robot, the leader–follower method, which could realize the coordinated movement and formation keeping for three or more robots, was adopted in this paper. Firstly, this paper depicts the formation design of multi robots, and the formation system is made up of two or three robots which can formed longitudinal formation, linear formation and triangular formation. And then, the formation strategy of multi robots based on leader–follower method was depicted and analyzed, including the principle of relative attitude observation and the design of kinematic controller. Finally, based on the theoretical analysis and calculation, a series of underwater experiments were carried out to test the performance of amphibious spherical multi robots with different formations; these experiments included longitudinal formation motion test, linear formation motion test, and triangular formation motion test. The experimental results demonstrated that the multi robots could realize different underwater formation motion accurately.