Design of control procedures for a free-floating underwater manipulation system

Abstract

In this paper we present a preliminary study concerning the stabilization of an underwater free-floating remotely operated vehicle fitted with a redundant manipulator. The controller structure follows the Orccad approach for robotic systems programming, which gathers control laws in continuous time at the low levels and discrete time logical aspects at higher levels. After being designed and verified, the basic actions of individual subsystems are logically composed to build more complex procedures up to a full mission design. While the system's performance can be checked using realistic simulations, crucial properties such as deadlock avoidance, safety and liveness are formally verified at both levels, using in particular some advantages of synchronous programming and associated tools. The approach is illustrated through simulation results while experiments are in progress.