ARTIFICIAL ACTIVE WHISKERS FOR GUIDING UNDERWATER AUTONOMOUS WALKING ROBOTS

Abstract

A low-cost, biologically inspired underwater walking robot (see Fig. 1) has been designed and built to covertly explore the seabed and to determine properties of submerged objects in obscure and inaccessible underwater locations. This paper focuses on a preliminary evaluation of an artificial active whisker to instrument this platform. Results demonstrate that both range and bearing to objects contacted by the whisker can be determined using simple data driven heuristics.