Cooperative Underwater Manipulation Systems: Control Developments within the MARIS project

A novel co-operative control algorithm has been presented in this paper for the transportation of large objects in underwater scenarios using two free floating vehicles, each one endowed with a 7 d.o.f redundant manipulator. The paper also gives detailed information about the theoretical foundations related to the kinematic and dynamic modelling, and then to the cooperative control, of the overall system. Due to the low bandwidth in underwater scenarios, the algorithm presented in the paper just exchanges six numbers (tool frame velocities) and still gives extremely good results even with such high limitations on the information exchange.