Session: MR-07-04: Novel Mechanisms, Robots, & Applications

Paper Number: 192073

192073 - Design and Development of a Multimodal Underwater Robot: An All-In-One Drifter, Glider, and Thruster 

Existing underwater robotic platforms are commonly designed around a single locomotion modality, such as drifting, gliding, or thruster-driven propulsion, which constrains their adaptability across diverse tasks and environments. Drifting offers energy-efficient passive transport and is particularly advantageous for collecting and measuring ambient flow information. Gliding enables long-range locomotion with low power consumption, making it suitable for sustained underwater operation. Thruster-driven propulsion, by contrast, provides agile and dexterous maneuvering, allowing active navigation in complex environments and recovery from trapped situations. Despite these complementary advantages, existing systems typically support only one of these locomotion modes within a single platform. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first underwater robot that integrates drifting, gliding, and thruster-driven locomotion into a single compact platform. The robot incorporates a buoyancy control module, a moving-mass pitch regulation mechanism, foldable wings for mode transition, and a rear propulsion and steering assembly for active maneuvering. This integrated design allows the robot to transition among three locomotion modes and exploit the unique strengths of each. Experimental results from underwater testing demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system and validate its multimodal locomotion capability. The proposed platform offers a versatile and adaptive solution for a broad range of underwater applications. A video demonstration of the robot's operation is available at: \url{https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UPet98mTcyKbKo40MnvGAv5SDveQyBz3/view?usp=drive_link}

Presenting Author: Craig Hiller PURDUE UNIVERSITY

Presenting Author Biography: n/a