Flexible lengthening-shortening arm mechanism for fishery resource management

The goal of this study was to use underwater robots instead of a diver’s observations to monitor and record the condition of an obstructed seabed in a shallow area. It is difficult to investigate marine resources that exist in deep water shaded by rock due to large and/or small rocks on the seabed. To solve these problems, we newly constructed a flexible lengthening-shortening arm with a small camera unit for an underwater robot to assist in the management of fishery resources. In this paper, we describe the concept and configuration of the newly developed arm mechanism using a sliding screw mechanism to overcome obstacles by changing arm posture in a two-dimensional plane, and we demonstrate the experimental results of a path-tracing controller for the rear links. The results were that the maximum deviations between the target path and the tracing path were less than 4.0% of the total width of the arm mechanism. These results suggest that the newly developed path-tracing algorithm is effective for our flexible lengthening-shortening arm mechanism.