Experimental and theoretical study on the motion of ROV with crawler system

Mobility characteristic of ROV with crawler system in steady running was theoretically and experimentally investigated. It was found experimentally that flipper type crawler system gave advantages when running on the irregular seafloor and when working on the seafloor. On the other hand, the experiment suggests that the static or quasi-static analysis is not enough to estimate the motion of ROV with a crawler system. This paper also shows theoretical approach on evaluating dynamic effects of the ROV motion. The crawler motion is formulated by the lumped-mass method. A computer code has been developed and some numerical results are shown.