On autonomous cooperative Underwater Floating Manipulation Systems

In this paper we present a novel co-operative control policy purely for the transportation of large objects in underwater environments using two free floating vehicles, each one endowed with a 7 D.O.F redundant manipulator. Due to the presence of harsh conditions in underwater scenarios, it is extremely important to realize algorithms that depend on a minimal amount of explicit information exchanged by the agent, or without any exchange of information at all. To achieve this goal the control policy proposed in the paper only requires the exchange of six numbers at each time instant, while however exhibiting extremely good performances, inspite of the restraints on the information exchange.

[1]  Massimo Caccia,et al.  MARIS: A national project on marine robotics for interventions , 2014, 22nd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[2]  Taskin Padir.  Kinematic redundancy resolution for two cooperating underwater vehicles with on-board manipulators , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[3]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Control of Free-Floating Humanoid Robots Through Task Prioritization , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos,et al.  PANDORA - Persistent Autonomy Through Learning, Adaptation, Observation and Replanning , 2012 .

[5]  Gianluca Antonelli,et al.  Fuzzy redundancy resolution and motion coordination for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems , 2003, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst..

[6]  Michael Gienger,et al.  Real-time collision avoidance with whole body motion control for humanoid robots , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Giuseppe Casalino,et al.  On a two-level hierarchical structure for the dynamic control of multifingered manipulation , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[8]  Y.C. Sun,et al.  Coordinated control of multiple cooperative underwater vehicle-manipulator systems holding a common load , 2004, Oceans '04 MTS/IEEE Techno-Ocean '04 (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37600).

[9]  Gianluca Antonelli,et al.  Task-priority redundancy resolution for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).

[10]  Jean-Jacques E. Slotine,et al.  A general framework for managing multiple tasks in highly redundant robotic systems , 1991, Fifth International Conference on Advanced Robotics 'Robots in Unstructured Environments.

[11]  Pedro J. Sanz,et al.  An open source tool for simulation and supervision of underwater intervention missions , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

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

[13]  Antonella Ferrara,et al.  AMADEUS: advanced manipulation for deep underwater sampling , 1997, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[14]  Oleari Fabio,et al.  Performance Evaluation of a Low-Cost Stereo Vision System for Underwater Object Detection , 2014 .

[15]  Tsuneo Yoshikawa,et al.  Manipulability of Robotic Mechanisms , 1985 .

[16]  Giuseppe Casalino,et al.  Floating Underwater Manipulation: Developed Control Methodology and Experimental Validation within the TRIDENT Project , 2014, J. Field Robotics.