Recent Progress of an Underwater Robotic Avatar

Abstract

This paper presents some of the recent progress of an underwater robotic avatar. The manipulation system of the avatar is enhanced in the terms of compliance, including the arm and the gripper. A rigid-foldable mechanism is applied to develop a compliant robotic arm that has the advantages of light weight, compactness, and expandability. By proposing a shape memory alloy-based module, the adjustable grasping stiffness of the gripper is achieved. Moreover, A human-robot shared control scheme is applied to reduce the burden on the human operator and enable high-level intelligent human-robot collaboration. Preliminary experimental results illustrate that the proposed components can meet the expected performance requirements, providing sufficient prior experience for future total integration of the underwater robotic avatar system.