Approach to Perform Contact Manipulation Operations by AUV with Multilink Manipulators

The paper presents an approach to perform underwater manipulation operations by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) with multilink manipulators (MM) with the creation of a given force on the surface of work objects without using of expensive 6-axis load cells. The creation of the necessary force at the MM mounting point, which makes it possible to perform contact operations, is carried out with the help of AUV thrusters. At the same time, the inevitable small deviations of the vehicle from the stabilization point that occur during the work are compensated by adjusting the position and orientation of the MM working tool. At the same time, the continuous following of the tool along a given trajectory is ensured. Identification of the force effects that occur when the tool comes into contact with the object of work is carried out with the help of torque observers of MM electric drives or with the help of relatively simple 1-axis torque sensors. At the same time, for the continuous exertion of a given force, a regulator was synthesized that generates additional control signals for the position of the MM tool in real time. System simulation was conducted in Simulink and visualized in CoppeliaSim. The simulation results showed the high performance of the system.