Development of Manipulator for Deep-Sea Benthic Organism Sampling Tasks

-First Report: Manipulator Structure and Control System-

Abstract

Underwater robots are employed to marine organisms' research in ultimate environments. In this study, we aim to do automation of marine organisms sampling by autonomous underwater vehicle with a manipulator. We developed a manipulator to pick up deep-sea benthic organisms. The developed manipulator is driven by a master-slave cylinder type hydraulic driven system. Moreover, the manipulator's joints are actuated by hydraulic cylinder, and linear motion of the cylinder is converted to rotational motion by a motion conversion cam-mechanism. This control system was integrated by MATLAB/Simulink. So we adopted Stateflow (this is a toolbox for Simulink) in the high level control layer.