For the first 18 months, work on overall architecture and robot design have been combined with studies on the eight fundamental technologies that are key to achieve the goal of SOMIRO, and fundamental studies on locomotion. In the design and implementation, it has focused on the larger scale, G1, swimming robot. With the worldwide shortage of semiconductor components, the robot needed larger components and a microcontroller with volatile memory. The robot was designed to work in a duty-cycle down to 0.2 sun solar intensity. All components have been delivered and the manufacturing of the robot is planned for August 2022.
On the critical component development for G1, a batch production manufacturing process was realized with high yield for the propulsion unit and swimming was showed with a tethered component. On the energy harvesting, a small four-cell solar panel showed the high capacity of 4.5 V and 12 mW at 0.25 sun. The on-site demonstration sites have been studied and it was decided that the demonstration will be made at the premises of aquaponic farmer, The Circle. When studying the environmental conditions, the most suitable spots in the basins had solar intensity never higher than 0.5 sun and most often above 0.2 sun.
In parallel, further development for the fully miniaturized and autonomous G2 milli-robot was made. Thin film sensors that operate at room temperature meet the requirements of the end user at the set power budget. On the communication, both uplink and downlink development were made. Especially, a novel technique for solar cell communication was developed with very high efficiency. Based on the G1 PCB design, a rigid-flex G2 PCB board with a first set of components was made and tested.
