Development of underwater mobile robot AQUA-X with new maneuvering method

Abstract

An Unmanned underwater vehicle is a type of robot that can maneuver under the sea surface without any human operator. The first Autonomous Underwater Vehicles was developed by the University of Washington in 1957 (Blidberg, 2013). In the last few decades, the researchers and manufactures are successful in the development of several different types of UAV and they built more than 200 AUVs, such as the well-known REMUS by WHOI (Allen, 1997), MIT Sea Grant’s Odyssey (Bovio, 2006), or P-SURO (Hong, 2010).These UAV are best suitable in military and many other commercial applications such as underwater surveillance, environment monitoring, underwater cable fault and oil ricks maintanence (Christopher, 2003). As the demand of high accuracy and smooth navigated UAV’s are spreading to many commercial and specially milatery applications, it becomes a chalange for the researchers. In this research article a new manuvering method is proposed for Underwater mobile robot, which use four (4) propellers that are specially placed in Cartesian Coordinate Configuration with parallel arrangement to provide the batter thrust and also for navigation purpose without use of actuated fins. This project intends to design and develop test bed autonomous and semi-autonomous underwater vehicle named AQUA-X Robot as a platform for further research as well as to applied in numerous field such as hydrographic surveys, mine counter measure (MCM) operation, environmental monitoring, search and salvage operation, fishery operation, scientific sampling and mapping, underwater acoustic research just namely a few as in (Arshad, 2004).