Swim-and-Breach at Palm Scale: A Rudder-Steered Two-Propeller Underwater Robot Platform with Differential-Thrust Pitch Control
arXiv:2609.17240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a palm-scale (65 mm, 34 g) swim-and-breach robot platform. Two vertically stacked propellers provide both propulsion and differential-thrust pitch control under a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loop, and a tail rudder adds yaw control. The hull, evaluated by flow simulation, reduces the drag five-fold relative to an equivalent cuboid, and the propellers are optimized using B-series modeling validated by dynamometer measurements.
Overview
arXiv:2609.17240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a palm-scale (65 mm, 34 g) swim-and-breach robot platform. Two vertically stacked propellers provide both propulsion and differential-thrust pitch control under a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loop, and a tail rudder adds yaw control. The hull, evaluated by flow simulation, reduces the drag five-fold relative to an equivalent cuboid, and the propellers are optimized using B-series modeling validated by dynamometer measurements. The current robot swims at 13.9 body lengths per second and turns at 209 deg per second, corresponding to the upper limits reported for underwater robots. In free swimming, the pitch loop turns the body to any commanded nose-up pitch angle, and, with the rudder stabilizing the exit, the current robot leaps 1.6 body lengths high and 3.7 long in a seamless cruise-leap-cruise sequence. The platform can be used to build small-scale robots that cross barriers and dry gaps between pools for inspection in streams, flooded structures, and industrial systems.
Source
Originally published at arxiv.org.
Related Articles
- Bi-MoDe: Bilateral Control-based Imitation Learning via Modifier-Conditioned Decoding for Modulation of Execution Speed and Contact Intensity
- MR-GLi: Mixed Reality-Based Gripper-Linked Overlays for Underwater Robot Arm Teleoperation via Bilateral Control
- Auto-HSI: Personalized human control of a robot swarm on demand by using LLMs for online automatic code generation
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17240