Recursive adaptive control for an underwater vehicle carrying a manipulator

The low level control for an underwater vehicle equipped with a manipulator is addressed in this paper. The end-effector trajectory is assumed to be properly inverted into vehicle and joint desired trajectories to be sent to the respective low level controllers. Off-the-shelf manipulators are often equipped with low level position or velocity joint control thus preventing the design of a controller at system level, i.e., taking into account the whole dynamic interactions. Design for the vehicle controller taking into account the presence of the manipulator is achieved resorting to an adaptive, recursive approach. A stability analysis is provided to analytically support the proposed controller. After physical considerations a minimal set of dynamic parameters is used in order to implement a light version of the controller. Numerical simulations validate the proposed approach.