Design and Control of a 6-DOF Fully Actuated Aerial-Aquatic Robot with Thrust Vectoring
Bocheng Tian, Yuchen Liu, Xiangyu Ren, Donghe Chen, Zonghao Zuo, Li Wen
Abstract
Single-medium, multi-degree-of-freedom robots often face limitations in aerial-aquatic tasks due to structural and weight constraints, which compromise their mobility in both air and water. To address this, we introduce a 6-degree-of-freedom fully actuated aerial-aquatic robot that employs thrust vectoring for enhanced performance. This innovative design incorporates four servos and four motors to facilitate coordinated operation. In air mode, the robot achieves decoupled control of attitude and position through servo angle feedforward compensation combined with dual-loop control. In underwater mode, it ensures high maneuverability by utilizing a dynamic model similar to a "weightless" state, employing single-loop control. Experimental results demonstrate that the robot can perform fully actuated movements in both air and water, successfully navigate the air-water boundary, and deploy sensors on inclined surfaces. These capabilities highlight the robot’s significant future application prospects.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2025_designandcontrol,
title = {Design and Control of a 6-DOF Fully Actuated Aerial-Aquatic Robot with Thrust Vectoring},
author = {Bocheng Tian and Yuchen Liu and Xiangyu Ren and Donghe Chen and Zonghao Zuo and Li Wen},
booktitle = {IROS 2025},
year = {2025}
}