Infrared Motion Guidance and Obstacle Avoidance of an ICPF Actuated Underwater Microrobot

-In this paper, a new type of underwater microrobot is proposed. The microrobot is driven by two pieces of ICPF (Ionic Conducting Polymer Film) actuators. An infrared sensor is equipped in front of the microrobot for motion guidance and obstacle avoidance. The dimension of the microrobot is 53 mm*8 mm*20 mm in size. The dried weight of the microrobot is 3g. The microrobot can float in water, swim within the horizontal plane. By means of outside infrared source from mother machine and the infrared sensor, we proposed speed strategy, shortest path strategy and energy saving strategy of motion guidance. An obstacle avoidance method is presented too. Experimental results show that these strategies and method are feasible in microrobot application. In centimeter scale microrobots driven by ICPF actuator, the motion guidance strategies and obstacle avoidance method make our microrobot smarter than those presented in previously published papers.