Adaptive Morphology for Aerial-Aquatic Robots
Aerial-aquatic mobility is envisaged to significantly facilitate applications involving aquatic sampling or underwater surveying. Allowing water vehicles to take flight allows for rapid deployment, access to remote areas, overflying of obstacles and easy transitioning between separate bodies of water. The use of a single vehicle capable of reaching distant locations rapidly, conducting measurements and returning to base, would greatly improve upon the current solutions, which often involve integrating different types of vehicles (e.g. vessels carrying deployable submarines), or rely heavily on manpower (e.g. sensors deployed manually from ships) The usage of single adaptive multi-modal robots for such applications can significantly improve the efficiency, costs and safety of such operations. We will review multiple aerial-aquatic UAVs and discuss elements of their morphology that allow its adaptation to the two environments. Design challenges and underlying principles behind these will be addressed, as well as insights into field operations with such vehicles.