A study on the swimming pattern of legged underwater robot

Abstract

KIOST (Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology) in Korea has been developing an underwater robot, Crabster. This robot has been designed to be able to walk and swim with legs without screws. However, it is difficult to get fluid dynamics of joint-robots in the water. Therefore, we conducted simulations with an optimization algorithm for swimming by considering simplified fluid dynamics in this paper. Drag-coefficient to be applied to the simulation war approximated values calculated by CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics: Tecplot 360, ANSYS). In addition, Optimized swimming patterns were applied to a real robot. As a result, we estimated drag coefficient by comparing drag force from simulation with optimized algorithm with drag force from the experiment with a real robot. And we will verify the swimming pattern from the optimized algorithm for swimming is most efficient through the experiment.