Experimental Research on Biorobotic Autonomous Undersea Vehicle

On August 2004, the SPC-II robofish, developed by the Robotics Institute in Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was used for aiding underwater archaeology in an experiment at the shipwreck site of Donggu gulf in Dongshan Island, Fujian Province. This experiment is not only the combination achievement of many subjects such as bionics, robotics, archaeology, oceanology, and so on, but also the first attempt to apply bionic propulsive mechanism to the real problem. Fernandez. Benoit, the pioneer of underwater archaeology in France, had said that “the biggest museum in the world is the sea-bottom” [1]. China is an ancient civilization country with a history of more than 5000 years. The voyage technique was used to be vigorous and business on the sea was very frequent, so we can imagine that there are abundant of cultural relic imbedded in the 3,000,000 sq.km sea area. In 1987, the laboratory of underwater archaeology was founded by the historical museum of China and then the first team of underwater archaeology was founded in China in 1990[1]. Now the underwater archaeology procedure can be divided into three phases. The first is large-scope searching. Usually the equipments such as sonar are carried by archaeological ship to find the doubtful site. Sometimes this work can be replaced by the information offered by fisherman. The second is the site validation. The equipments such as lighting and vidicon were carried to the sea-bottom to do close observation, and the pictures or sample objects are sent back to do more analyses. The third is salvage and excavation. It need long time to do underwater work such as divide region, clear bed load, recover site, salvage cultural relic and so on. In the above three phases, the last two are more pivotal and need to be performed on the sea-bottom. Normally they are completed by the archaeological team members. It can be seen that underwater work plays an important role in the task of underwater archaeology. Because of the restriction of human body physiology (narcosis of nitrogen), generally people can only dive to 60m to70m in depth. And meanwhile people are weightless in the water, movement inconvenience, overdraft of physical strength, short duration, and needing long time to be decompressed, all make the work inefficient[2]. The early underwater archaeology was difficult, and the deepwater archaeology was almost impossible in a manner. O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg