A Task Priority and Dynamic Programming Based Approach to Agile Underwater Floating Manipulation

The present paper deals with a specific part of the activities performed within the currently on going EU-FP7 funded project TRIDENT (http://www.irs.uji.es/trident), whose objectives include the development of a multipurpose Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (I-AUV) exhibiting smart manipulation capabilities within unstructured underwater environments. The considered activities are those developed within WP 5 of the project, aiming to design the functional and algorithmic real-time control architecture (and the relative real-time control software) in charge of coordinating both vehicle and arm motions in a concurrent way; this is done to improve the overall performances via the system agility obtained by reducing at most the need for separate sequential motions, while also guaranteeing the fulfilment of all the enabling and safety system conditions.