Autonomous trajectory planning and following for industrial underwater manipulators

While autonomous motion planning and control of ground based manipulators has received a lot of interest by researchers in the past three decades, autonomous operation of industrial underwater manipulators is not that well documented. The main bottlenecks in the autonomous operation of underwater manipulators is the dependance on factory supplied master-slave controllers and absence of precise, high speed computer based controllers. Recently, a computer based communication interface was presented in [1] for the industrial Orion7P manipulator from Schilling robotics. The present paper builds up on this computer interface and presents the application of existing and proven methods of autonomous motion planning and control from ground based manipulation to the underwater manipulation domain. Approaches for autonomous collision free path planning and trajectory following are presented for applications involving industrial standard underwater manipulators. These approaches are validated by experiments conducted on a real Orion7P manipulator. This paper thus presents a complete approach for autonomous collision free trajectory planning and execution for industrial underwater manipulators.