Date of final exam: 24/02/2000

E-mail: antonell@unina.it

Tutor: Prof.  B. Siciliano, Università degli Studi di Napoli

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Motion and force control of underwater vehicle-manipulator systems   ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Advisor:

Prof.  B. Siciliano, Università degli Studi di Napoli

Summary of the thesis

This thesis deals with the main control aspects in underwater manipulation tasks.
First, the mathematical model is discussed, the aspects with significant impact on the control strategy will be remarked. In Chapter 2, kinematic control for underwater manipulation is presented. Kinematic control plays a significant role in unstructured robotics where off-line trajectory planning is not a reliable approach; moreover, the vehicle-manipulator system is often kinematically redundant with respect to the most common tasks and redundancy resolution algorithms can then be applied to exploit such characteristic.
Dynamic control is then discussed in Chapter 3, several motion control schemes have been analyzed and presented in this thesis. Some experimental results on motion control and fault tolerance to thrusters' faults with the autonomous vehicle ODIN (without manipulator) are presented.
In Chapter 4, the interaction with the environment is discussed. Such kind of operation is critical in underwater manipulation for several reasons that do not allow direct implementation of the force control strategies developed for ground robotics.
Finally, after having developed some conclusions, a simulation tool for multi- body systems is presented. This software package, developed to test the control strategies studied along the thesis, has been designed according to modular requirements that make it possible to generate generic robotic systems in the desired environment.
 

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