[Submitted on 6 Sep 2026]
Title:Design and Attitude Control of an Underwater Quadruped Robot
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Abstract:Legged robots are versatile on land, but their use in underwater environments remains limited. Extending quadruped locomotion to water enables amphibious mobility with applications in inspection, environmental monitoring and disaster response. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of a reproducible underwater quadruped robot. The robot is built around custom waterproof motor housings machined from polyoxymethylene plastic, which use off-the-shelf O-rings and dynamic shaft seals. A simplified model is derived to describe the dynamics of this underwater legged system, capturing how drag forces on spherical end effectors transmit torque to the floating base. Building on this model, a closed-loop attitude controller is developed using an error formulation defined on the special orthogonal group SO(3). The controller is evaluated both in simulation and experimentally in a water tank, where the robot tracks desired orientation setpoints in roll, pitch and yaw.
Comments: 16 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to ISRR 2026
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.09217 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.09217v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09217
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Davide Molinaroli [view email] [v1] Sun, 6 Sep 2026 17:19:31 UTC (5,747 KB)
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