Step Counting System for the Whale Rover

Abstract

Sperm whales are known to prey on giant squids, but no one has ever seen the moment of predation because of behavior in the deep sea. To capture the predation scene, we are developing the whale rover expected to walk on the body surface. Until now, the seventh prototype achieved absorption on the whale for a period of time, but we had no way to know if the rover had walked. In this paper, we proposed a system that can count steps by measuring the number of rotations of the propeller. We applied the developed system to the results of field experiments in Ogasawara, and showed that the rover achieved adsorption walking on the body surface.