Conceptual design and implementation of an Arctic under-ice legged/gliding morphing robot

With rising temperatures and complete melting of Arctic ice expected by 2050, an increasing interest in exploiting Arctic resources and protecting the Arctic from exploitation requires advanced technology be deployed to achieve long duration environmental monitoring and data collection. This will provide the necessary knowledge to guide the development of the Arctic in the coming decades. Here, we have concept designed and implemented for the first time an autonomous underwater morphing robot prototype known as First Arctic Under-ice Ocean Walking Laboratory (FAU-OWL) for long duration environmental monitoring and data collection in the Arctic. This underwater robot is capable of skiing or being anchored upside-down under a sheet of ice using buoyancy control in combination with suction cups and can travel long distances by morphing its legs into wings in order to glide as well as walk. In this paper, the detailed structure, working modes, energy supplement and equipped sensors were explained, and then the dynamics of FAU-OWL under different working modes was studied. Besides, the hydrodynamic characteristics of FAU-OWL were analyzed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software known as Star-CCM. Finally, the working principle of FAU-OWL under different working modes in combination with the test situation was described in detail.