Towards autonomous area inspection with a bio-inspired underwater legged robot

Recently, a new category of bio-inspired legged robots moving directly on the seabed have been proposed to complement the abilities of traditional underwater vehicles and to enhance manipulation and sampling tasks. So far, only tele-operated use of underwater legged robots has been reported and in this paper we attempt to fill such gap by presenting the first step towards autonomous area inspection. First, we present a 3 dimensional single-legged model for underwater hopping locomotion and derive a path following control strategy. Later, we adapt such control strategy to an underwater hexapod robot SILVER2 on the robotic simulator Webots. Finally, we simulate a full autonomous mission consisting in the inspection of an area over a pre-defined path, target recognition, transition to a safer gait and target approach. Our results show the feasibility of the approach and encourage the implementation of the presented control strategy on the robot SILVER2.