This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube robots. Each robot can move in six DoF with eight thrusters and can be rigidly connected to other ModCube robots with an electromagnet controlled by onboard computer. In this paper, we present a novel method for characterizing and visualizing dynamic behavior, along with four benchmarks to evaluate the morphological performance of the robot. Analysis shows that our ModCube design is desirable for omnidirectional tasks, compared with the configurations widely used by commercial underwater robots. We run real robot experiments in two water tanks to demonstrate the robust control and self-assemble of the proposed system, We also open-source the design and code to facilitate future research.
@article{arxiv.2409.15627,
title = {ModCube: Modular, Self-Assembling Cubic Underwater Robot},
author = {Jiaxi Zheng and Guangmin Dai and Botao He and Zhaoyang Mu and Zhaochen Meng and Tianyi Zhang and Weiming Zhi and Dixia Fan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.15627},
year = {2025}
}