Preliminary experiments of a human-portable underwater gripper robot for dexterous tasks

This paper reports the development and experiments of an underwater 6-DOF gripper robot. The developed gripper robot is a human-portable remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that weighs approximately 31 kg in air. The most important feature of this robot is that it can grasp cylindrical objects of 50-500 mm diameter, and handle them in 6 DOF. We also developed a dedicated operating device to use the gripper robot effectively. To reduce the operator burden during underwater tasks, several software functions of the operating device are provided, such as thrust allocation, depth control, and pitch angle control. Experiments in a test tank demonstrated the motion performance of the developed robot and the effectiveness of the operating device.