Control and Implementation of Underwater Vehicle Manipulator System

Abstract

For tasks like handling objects under the water, an Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System (UVMS) can be used. Control of the motion of the manipulator is not easy since the vehicle can be easily destabilized due to disturbances such as handling payloads by the manipulator, currents, etc. To secure stability of the UVMS, the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) algorithm is proposed. Also, to have optimal posture of the redundant manipulator, an optimization algorithm using redundancy resolution method is proposed. To verify the performance of the ZMP algorithm, a testbed composed of a floating vehicle with the redundant manipulator was developed. The results show that the end-effector tracks the desired trajectory accurately while keeping the stability of UVMS.