Design, validation and manufacturing of an anthropomorphic manipulator for rovs using titanium rapid prototyping

It is at least two decades since the conventional robotic manipulators have become a common manufacturing tool for different industries, from automotive to pharmaceutical. The advances in manipulators and sensors have given robots the opportunity to become useful for more and more applications. Engineers have taken advantage of the extra mobility of the advanced robots to make them work in constrained environments, ranging from limited joint motions for redundant manipulators to obstacles in the way of mobile (ground, marine, and aerial) robots [1]. However, the incorporation some of these abilities and capacities that are already being used in land, have not made their way to the sea domain. This Abstract describes the project consisting in the design, development and manufacture of a prototype manipulator arm for ROVs introducing innovative fabrication technologies. The work has been done collaboratively among ACSM Maritime Agency SL, CIMA Group and the University of Vigo.