Design of the swimming system of a bionic jellyfish robot for seabed exploration

The unmanned sampling and analysis after return of seabed rocks is an important method for deep-sea mineral resources exploration. A novel underwater robot for ultrasonic drilling and sampling tasks of seabed rocks is proposed based on the bionic design method in this paper. The jellyfish-like structure is adopted for the swimming system of the robot, which can move flexibly and stably with low noise, outstanding cruising ability and strong environmental adaptability. The mechanical system and driving control strategy of the robot are designed in this paper. Based on co-simulation method of ADAMS and MATLAB software, the structural parameters of the transmission mechanism of the swimming system are optimized to get larger swing angle under relative less driving power, which will contribute to the improvement of propulsion efficiency. Through the fluid dynamics simulation and analysis in FLUENT software, the propulsion process can be visualized and the propulsion mechanism is revealed. To verify the feasibility of the design, a robot prototype is developed and the experimental platform for the robot's swimming test is built. The underwater experiments on motion characteristics for the robot demonstrates that the maximum propulsive force generated by the swimming system can reach about 16N, and the propulsion speed can reach 0.19m/s. The design and development of the bionic robot for seabed ultrasonic drilling and sampling missions provides new ideas for seabed resource exploration technology.