Experimental Validation of End-Effector Stabilization for Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator Systems in Subsea Operations

This paper considers the kinematic control approach for controlling an underwater vehicle-manipulator system. Three different kinematic control schemes have been applied, and the performance of each scheme is compared. The kinematic control schemes provide velocity references, while the control system aims to keep a fixed position for the manipulator’s end-effector, and at the same time compensate for slowly varying motions of the underwater vehicle. Experimental results show that the proposed full modified kinematic control scheme has better performance than the decoupled kinematic control scheme, while it nicely outperforms the full kinematic control scheme. All the control schemes are good alternatives for controlling an underwater vehicle-manipulator system using kinematic control.