Motion Control and Computer Simulation for Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator Systems

In this paper, a new motion control scheme is presented for an underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS). The system is composed of a six degree-of-freedom (DOF) autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and an n robot manipulator that is mounted on the AUV. We use Quasi-Lagrange formulation to gain the model of UVMS, which considers major hydrodynamic effects. A sliding mode controller is designed to implement control of the trajectory tracking. The advantage of this controller is that it doesn't require a model of the whole UVMS. And we use a fuzzy logic to turn for the gains of the sliding mode controller to get the best response characteristic of the system. In the end of this paper, computer simulations are performed to verify the efficacy of the motion control scheme and the conclusion are presented in the paper.