Research on Motion Mode Switching Method Based on CPG Network Reconstruction

Traditional underwater robots have many shortcomings in terms of resistance to sea currents, stability and functionality. In order to improve the efficiency and quality of underwater operations, this paper proposes and designs a new underwater robot, the navigation and crawl underwater unmanned vehicle (NCUUV), it has two motion modes: swimming and crawling. In order to enable the robot to have the ability to switch motion modes, this paper designed a motion mode switching mechanism, and verified the effectiveness of the mechanism through experiments, which proved that the mechanism has good motion reliability and accuracy. In order to control NCUUV to smoothly switch the motion mode, a controller based on the central pattern generator (CPG) was developed. The upper controller reconstructs the CPG network in the middle controller according to the feedback information of the acoustic rangefinder. The CPG network in the middle controller has two configurations: a triangular fully symmetrical network and a hexagonal fully symmetrical network, and the CPG network can be freely changed between the two configurations according to the instructions of the upper controller. These two configurations control NCUUV’s swimming and crawling respectively, so as to realize the smooth switching between swimming and crawling. The experimental result shows that this control mechanism of motion mode switching can enable NCUUV to stably realize motion mode switching and the switching process is smooth and reliable.