Development and Control of a Humanoid Underwater Robot

With the deepening of ocean development, the tasks that underwater vehicles need to perform are more complex. Shared control provides a reliable scheme for robots to accomplish these tasks under teleoperation. At present, most of the underwater vehicles are equipped with traditional mechanical manipulator, which is challenging to realize the application of shared control. So, we developed a highly humanoid underwater robot for shared control. The robot is equipped with two humanoid arms. It can be remotely controlled by the operator through the full ocean depth optical fiber, and can also realize simple task planning based on its control system. We have realized and improved the auxiliary function in the operation room, such as motion capture, data fusion, etc. We built detailed modelling and simulation analysis of the robot, and used the sliding mode controller to achieve the stability control of the robot. Its reliability has been verified in the simulation and experiment. Finally, the robot completed the task autonomously in the offline state and showed a better control effect and stronger task completion ability under the shared control.