Motion control of underwater robotic arm using calibration-free visual servoing system

Underwater manipulators are traditionally controlled by skilled operators to achieve tasks, e.g. underwater survey, inspection, construction and repair operations. However, these systems need much human resources and huge control systems. Thereby, the automation of control of underwater manipulators are required to reduce the work load of operators. In order to satisfy the requirements, this paper introduces a method that controls underwater manipulators using visual information observed by stereo cameras. The characteristics of the method is the robustness against calibration errors of cameras and kinematical relation between cameras and manipulators. Operators can control manipulators adaptively by pointing a target on images captured by cameras using the method. In this paper, the usefulness of the method is verified through experimental results using an underwater robotic arm which has 4 DOFs.

[1]  Nilanjan Sarkar,et al.  A unified force control approach to autonomous underwater manipulation , 2001, Robotica.

[2]  R. Lakshmi,et al.  Control of underwater robots in working mode , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[3]  K. Hamilton,et al.  Autonomous docking for Intervention-AUVs using sonar and video-based real-time 3D pose estimation , 2003, Oceans 2003. Celebrating the Past ... Teaming Toward the Future (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37492).

[4]  Junku Yuh,et al.  Underwater autonomous manipulation for intervention missions AUVs , 2009 .

[5]  Sadao Kawamura,et al.  A new feedback robot control method based on position/image sensor integration , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[6]  Gianluca Antonelli,et al.  Recursive adaptive control for an underwater vehicle carrying a manipulator , 2014, 22nd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[7]  Louis L. Whitcomb,et al.  Underwater robotics: out of the research laboratory and into the field , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[8]  Gabriel Oliver,et al.  Intervention AUVs: The next challenge , 2015, Annu. Rev. Control..

[9]  Carlos Henrique Farias dos Santos,et al.  A reactive neural network architecture to redundancy resolution for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[10]  Kiyoshi Ioi,et al.  Modelling and simulation of an underwater manipulator , 1989, Adv. Robotics.