Kinematic redundancy resolution for two cooperating underwater vehicles with on-board manipulators

This paper studies the inverse kinematics problem for two underwater vehicles with on-board manipulators cooperating to carry a common rigid object. The coordinate frames are assigned to the system formed by the two underwater vehicle-manipulator mechanisms and the rigid load and a set of generalized coordinates are selected to describe the system configuration. The kinematic position and velocity relations are obtained. A kinematic model is formulated for the system to be used for solving the inverse kinematics problem. The pseudovelocities are introduced in order to incorporate the kinematic constraint equations into the kinematic velocity relations. A task-priority redundancy resolution technique is presented in which the kinematic redundancy is used to accomplish secondary tasks of the design choice.