Development of Hovering Type Underwater Robot for Ecological Surveillance

Recently, various forms of ocean energy such as wave, tidal, marine current, and ocean thermal energy conversion are considered as source of alternative clean energy because of the increased oil price, international political issues, and global warming issues, etc. For this reason, underwater robot is believed to play a key role in both development and protection of the ocean. Until now, underwater robots typically called AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) have been used for relatively simple tasks such as underwater data gathering for wide area. This is a kind of off-line data gathering. If any information can be extracted during the operation, overall tasks could be more reliable and its efficiency would be increased. However, it is hard for underwater robots to solve recogintion issues compared to other ground robots in that the underwater environment often deals with many challenging dynamic uncertainties. With this in mind, we developed a hovering type underwater robot for surveillance of the ocean, which is named as yShark. In the paper, we introduce a big picture of yShark in terms of system design, sensor specifications as well as initial results of example studies for visual recognition.