A Task & Subsystem Priority Based Control Strategy for Underwater Floating Manipulators

The need for actual autonomy in underwater vehicle is rapidly increasing. Many challenging issues derive from such a trend, one in all the need of controlling the motion of an I-AUV to accomplish complex tasks. To this aim, this work presents a control coordination strategy based on Task Priorities and Dynamic Programming techniques for an I-AUV endowed with a redundant manipulator. The resulting algorithmic structure is able to manage prioritized tasks of both equality and inequality type, while also establishing motion priorities among the composing mechanical subsystems. Simulative results are presented with respect to the floating manipulator which is currently under development within the EU-FP7 funded TRIDENT project.