Analysing cutting dynamics and mechanism design for AUVs navigating flexible fishing net hazards

ABSTRACT

In order to achieve autonomy in addressing the threats such as entanglement of derelict fishing gear (DFG), it is necessary for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to integrate a reasonable cutting mechanism.However, the interaction characteristics of flexible fishing nets and cutting tools, as well as the time-varying topology increase the complexity of the cutting process. Therefore, the cutting process of cutting flexible fishing net line is analyzed in detail in this paper.By observing the cutting force and displacement characteristics of the cutting deformation stage of the fishing net line, the fracture performance under different cutting ratios was analysed, the cutting forms that complete the cutting operation with smaller cutting forces were explored.Finally, the expressions for local stiffness and rupture cutting energy were established to quantify the difficulty of the cutting, which guided the design of a built-in cutting mechanism matching with the space size of the AUV.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV
• flexible material
• cutting
• derelict fishing gear, DFG

Acknowledgement

We also would like to gratefully acknowledge the team of the underwater glider research at HUST.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

No data was used for the research described in the article.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chang Yuan: Conceptualisation, 3D modelling, writing – original draft. Jianxing Zhang: Review and proofread the first draft of the paper. Baoren Li: Conceptualisation, methodology, Funding acquisition. Xinyu Wu: Data processing and writing modification. Donghai Zeng: Literature survey, software. Yuxuan Peng: Content modification.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFC0301204) for the research of this paper.