Control system design for a small underwater vehicle manipulator system – a case study

This article examines established areas of application for underwater vehicle manipulator systems and, based on this, identifies new use cases. For economic and logistical reasons, these new areas of application speak in favor of the use of miniature vehicles. The operation of these is complicated by pronounced coupling effects between manipulator and carrier vehicle. Existing vehicle guidance, navigation and control systems only take these coupling effects into account indirectly or neglect them. In contrast, the presented system contains a control concept that includes model-based feed forward control for the carrier vehicle, the manipulator, and the target object. The function of the developed control system is demonstrated in real-world validation experiment. The results for the control system with different levels of feed forward control are compared.