Manipulation and Transportation With Cooperative Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems

Autonomous underwater manipulation has been a topic of interest since the early 1990s. In the past few years, several milestone projects such as SAUVIM and TRIDENT have demonstrated autonomy capabilities for a single underwater vehicle manipulator system (UVMS) in performing simple manipulation tasks, e.g., the recovery of an object from the seafloor. The Italian funded MARIS project aims to extend some of these results to multiple UVMSs performing a cooperative transportation task of a long object such as a pipe. This paper presents the results achieved in developing a unifying architecture for the control of both individually and cooperatively operating UVMSs which explicitly makes use of a limited amount of information exchange between the agents, which is needed due to the severe bandwidth limitations of the underwater acoustic communications. A complete execution of the reference transportation mission is presented to support the proposed distributed algorithm. Furthermore, hydrodynamic simulations of the cooperative transportation phase are presented and an analysis of the achievable performances as different communication schemes are employed is given.