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Fin Actuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
The robots are each powered by four servos. Two are located in the rear of the robot and power the two links of the tail assembly. The other two servos control the motion of the forward fins; their motion is fully independent of one another. To be able to orient itself, the robot has a depth gauge (a pressure sensor) and a 3-D magnetic compass. The fish is tuned to be neutrally buoyant; that is, when placed at some depth, it will neither float nor sink. Due to pressure changes and compression/decompression resulting in volume changes of the vehicle, the buoyancy is not constant. A current device under development is a buoyancy tuner to adjust buoyancy as the robot moves to different depths. For purposes of development and testing, an instrumented tank has been built in the lab. The tank is an above-ground swimming pool 8ft deep, 8ft wide and 20ft long. Underwater cameras connected to an external computer provide the ability to track the vehicles in the water in real time. This data is processed for 3D position information and transmitted via RC broadcast to all vehicles in the tank. The broadcast information contains vehicle identification codes and can also include information for simulated vehicles to provide a group effectively much larger than the existing three vehicles. |
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Videos of the first two prototypes in action are below. Movies are in wmv or avi format. Note that our server has some issues with wmv files. If the video will not stream correctly, please right click and save the video to your computer. We apologize for the inconvenience. Robofish 1.0 & 2.0 (wmv)· Robofish 2.0:Heading and Depth Control · Robofish 2.0: Depth Control in the new indoor tank. · Robofish 1.0 & 2.0: Heading Control in the outdoor pool. · Robofish 1.0:
Pectoral Dolphin movement in the outdoor pool. Robofish 2.0 (avi)· Robofish 2.0, Depth Heading (13Mb avi) · Robofish 2.0, Heading and Depth Control (6.7Mb avi) Robofish 1.0 (avi/mpg)· Robofish 1.0, Depth Heading (21Mb avi) |
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Click on the thumbnails for a larger view. Pop-up blocking software may interfere with this page. If clicking on a thumbnail does not pop up a high resolution photo, turn off the blocking software and try again. |
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The test facility for the robots is a tank 8ft by 8ft by 20ft, holding about 10,000 gallons of water. |
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Last updated on: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 14:22. Send questions or comments to morgansen@aa.washington.edu. |
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