Energy-awared Diving Control for A Deep-sea Hexapod Robot

Among various underwater robots, a deep-sea hexapod robot is able to both sail in the water and crawl on the seafloor at a large water depth. In the underwater operation process of the hexapod robot, the diving process is crucial for achieving a safe and energy efficient operation. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy-awared diving control approach for an underwater hexapod robot. This paper first presents a kinematic diving motion model and analyzes the energy consumption of the robot in the diving process. After this, an energy-awared diving control approach is proposed to partition the whole diving process into four successive parts: free diving, constant speed descent, deceleration, and free landing. Each of the four parts is with a special design for the thruster and control setting. An optimization formulation of the energy-awared diving control problem has been derived and simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed diving control approach.