Characteristics evaluation of the vertical motion of a spherical underwater robot

This paper evaluated the vertical movement characteristics of a spherical underwater robot. Firstly, the vectored water-jet propulsion system was employed to realize vertical motion. In order to facilitate the estimation of robot parameters, some simplification were proposed to estimate robot parameters based on its structure features. And then, the vertical control parameters had been calculated to achieve a high accuracy on vertical movements. In addition, the pressure sensor was used into the closed-loop control system. Finally, some experiments had been carried out to verify the result of parameter calculation and the performance of the proposed vertical control system.