TEAMER: Electrically Engaged Undulation System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Description

This TEAMER RFTS 1 (Request for Technical Support) project supported the flume tank testing of a long range, high endurance unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) to monitor maritime space. Today, battery-powered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) lack the duration to make persistent, wide-area data collection possible.The proposed solution, an Electrically Engaged UnduLation (EEL) drone, can sustain missions for longer duration through hydrodynamic energy harvesting. Power is provisioned via the piezoelectric effect, a material-led phenomenon that converts applied stress into electricity. The EEL subsystems include power, propulsion, navigation, ballast, telemetry, and instrumentation. By mimicking the gait of aquatic eels, EEL can counter currents during maneuvering and level-flight. The identified opportunity is in the future capability of extreme endurance UUVs in swarms. The specific goal for the EEL development is to expand the spatio-temporal coverage of the existing ocean observation mission by overcoming significant challenges of autonomous robotics. Some of the challenges presented include novel compliant mechanism for robust actuation, bio-inspired design to emulate efficient locomotion, smart material-based energy harvesting for sustained power, and swarming architecture through enabled autonomy.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
75 Includes data of various steady state measurements of drag and lift at various constant tow velocities. See the corresponding READ_ME in this submission for column headers for measurements and units. https://mhkdr.openei.org/files/481/A5841.xlsx.mat
22 Graphs of drag data vs. time measure at different velocity in a tow tank. https://mhkdr.openei.org/files/481/drag-lift_time.jpg
47 Column headers for associated Matlab data file in this submission. https://mhkdr.openei.org/files/481/EEL_Sys_READ_ME.txt
21 MHKDR link to Excel data for EEL system https://mhkdr.openei.org/submissions/388

Tags

  • unmanned-underwater-vehicle
  • uuv
  • hydrokinetic
  • eel
  • rfts-1
  • oceanographic-instruments
  • mhk
  • piezoelectric-effect
  • performance-data
  • matlab
  • bio-locomotion
  • marine
  • power
  • code
  • teamer
  • instruments
  • technology
  • steady-state
  • electrically-engaged-undulation
  • autonomous-robotics
  • energy

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