Supervisory control architecture for underwater teleoperation

An overall concept and specific system elements for teleoperated vehicles and manipulators are presented. The approach emphasizes continuous, real-time sharing of control between both the human operator and the computer system and is intended for application to the JASON underwater vehicle now in development. As JASON will have extremely high communications bandwidth available through a fiber optic cable, the emphasis will be on aiding and extending the capabilities of the human operator. Specific elements presented include task-resolved motion specification, rule-based inverse kinematics, and robust and adaptive nonlinear tracking control.