Design of communication and video system for a multi-legged subsea robot

The MOERI-KORDI has launched a new project to develop multi-legged subsea robot technologies. The objective of 1st stage is to develop a multi-legged robot walking in high tidal current and high turbidity environment while the objective of 2nd stage is to develop a walking and flying robot with 6 legs in deep sea where is calm and clear environment. This paper presents the design of communication and video system for the multi-legged subsea robot and its test bed. The basic design concept of communication system is simple connectivity based on Gigabit Ethernet network. Several serial networks for sensors and motors in the robot are grouped into one Ethernet line using a small I/O computer. The focus of video system design is on compressed digital transmission using network cameras and video encoder for analog cameras. This approach can minimize electronic and magnetic interference in analog data transmission and decrease the amount of transmission data. We constructed the test bed to verify the designed system. The results of performance evaluation using the test bed show that the network throughput is enough to connect all designed devices and the optimal method of video encoding is the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format with 30% compression rate.