Development of an autonomous underwater robot ''TWin-Burger'' for testing intelligent behaviors in realistic environments
An autonomous underwater robot named ''Twin-Burger'' was developed as a versatile test bed to establish the techniques which realize intelligent robot behaviors. The robot was designed to have necessary functions for complex tasks including cooperative task execution with other robots and divers. The first robot ''Twin-Burger I'' was completed and launched in November 1992. This paper describes hardware and software systems of the robot. Motion of the robot is controlled by sliding controllers based on simplified equations of motion which are derived from system identification experiments. Tank tests proved that the robot was able to cruise along a commanded path as a sequence of control actions generated by the sliding controllers. The Distributed Vehicle Management Architecture (DVMA) is applied to the robot as an architecture for the control software. Mission execution experiments shows that the Twin-Burger behaves appropriately according to the mission and environmental conditions.
autonomous underwater robot sliding control test bed system distributed system behavior control transputers software architecture