This paper describes an underwater 3500 m electric manipulator (named Huahai-4E,stands for four functions deep ocean electric manipulator in China),which has been developed at underwater manipulation technology lab in Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) for a test bed of studying of deep ocean manipulation technologies.The manipulator features modular integration joints,and layered architecture control system.The oil-filled,pressure-compensated joint is compactly designed and integrated of a permanent magnet (PM) brushless motor,a drive circuit,a harmonic gear and an angular feedback potentiometer.The underwater control system is based on a network and consisted of three embedded PC/104 computers which are used for servo control,task plan and target sensor respectively.They communicate through User Datagram Protocol (UDP) multicast communication in Vxworks OS.A supervisor PC with a virtual 3D GUI is fiber linked to underwater control system.Furthermore,the manipulator is equipped with a sensor system including a unique ultra-sonic probe array and an underwater camera.Autonomous grasp strategy based multi-sensor is studied.The results of watertight test in 40 MPa,joint's efficiency test and autonomous grasp experiments in tank are also presented.
