Development of Mechanism for Micro Surface Robot with Rotating Sonar-Beam

Recently, the needs for the development and application of the micro marine robot (MMR) which has the advantages in terms of size and cost are increasing. However, the basis is very short in the domestic. While the obstacle avoidance sonar (OAS) which was optimized in terms of size and performance and has the ability of 4-directional detection was developed for the obstacle avoidance of the micro surface robot (MSR) fortunately, the problem that the detection performance is degraded according to the shape of the obstacle because of using the fixed sonar-beam with the limited beam width and detection range exists. To solve this problem, the MSR mechanism that implements the rotating sonar-beam using the spur gear and the servo motor is proposed in this paper. To verify the performance of the proposed mechanism, the wall-tracking of the MSR is considered and the comparison and analysis in term of detection performance and actuation command is performed with conventional fixed sonar-beam. The test results show the validity of the proposed mechanism.