Co-ordinated control of multiple manipulators in underwater robots

Abstract

Reports analysis and simulation studies for the co-ordinated control of multiple manipulators on a free swimming underwater robot. The control objective is to perform an open loop control of the end effector position of one of the arms. A formulation is derived for both the inverse dynamics and inverse kinematics of an underwater robot with multiple manipulators, having a redundancy in degrees of freedom (DOF) of motion, in the presence of external generalised forces. The method is applied to a model of an underwater robot comprising a 6 DOF mission arm and a further pair of 2 DOF paddling arms used for stabilisation in a free swimming condition. The numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the presented co-ordinated control method with the assistance of the stabilising arms.