Coordinated control of multiple cooperative underwater vehicle-manipulator systems holding a common load

We propose two simple setpoint controllers for the coordinated control of multiple cooperative UVMS holding a common object. The controllers allow two or more UVMS to carry a rigid object at the same time, moving from one initial position to the target destination in the unstructured underwater environment. The objective of this work is to use simple feedback control method for the coordination of multiple cooperative UVMS. Lyapunov-like functions are proposed for convergence and stability analysis of the systems. Sufficient conditions for choosing the feedback gains to guarantee the stability are presented.