11 accepted papers
Unmanned underwater vehicles are increasingly employed for maintenance and surveying tasks at sea, but their operation in shallow waters is often hindered by hydrodynamic disturbances such as waves, currents, and turbulence. These unsteady flows can induce rapid changes in direction and speed, compr…
Hyper-redundant tendon-driven manipulators offer greater flexibility and compliance over traditional manipulators. A common way of controlling such manipulators relies on adjusting tendon lengths, which is an accessible control parameter. This approach works well when the kinematic configuration is
With the increasing demand for human-computer interaction (HCI), flexible wearable gloves have emerged as a promising solution in virtual reality, medical rehabilitation, and industrial automation. However, the current technology still has problems like insufficient sensitivity and limited durabilit
Stability and reliable operation under a spectrum of environmental conditions is still an open challenge for soft and continuum style manipulators. The inability to carry sufficient load and effectively reject external disturbances are two drawbacks which limit the scale of continuum designs, preven…
Operating in the near-vicinity of marine energy devices poses significant challenges to the control of underwater vehicles, predominantly due to the presence of large magnitude wave disturbances causing hazardous state perturbations. Approaches to tackle this problem have varied, but one promising s…
Active textiles have shown promising applications in soft robotics owing to their tunable stiffness and design flexibility. Given the breadth of the design space for planar and spatial arrangements of these woven structures, a rigorous and generalizable characterisation of these systems is not yet a
Shallow water environments pose daunting scenarios for the operation of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), due to significantly larger wave disturbances being present in comparison to a typical deep sea situation. Performing inspection and maintenance tasks at close quarters in these conditions re…
Predictive control methods can substantially improve the performance of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), particularly in shallow water environments or near the free surface where wave induced disturbance are of magnitude comparable to the vehicle characteristic inertia. To facilitate the adoptio
Pulsatile flow is widespread in nature, but replicating such impulsive periodic pumping routines with traditional rotary actuators is complex and energetically inefficient. We demonstrate the feasibility of an actuator capable of generating impulsive flow displacement by exploiting the bistable equi
Flagellated micro-organism are regarded as excellent swimmers within their size scales. This, along with the simplicity of their actuation and the richness of their dynamics makes them a valuable source of inspiration to design continuum, self-propelled underwater robots. Here we introduce a soft, f…
This paper reports on the development and validation of the elastodynamics model of an innovative underwater soft-bodied robot inspired by cephalopods. The vehicle, for which the model is devised, is propelled by a discontinuous activation routine which entails the collapse of an elastic shell via c…