Active control of an underwater flexible manipulator subject to external disturbance

This article studies the boundary control design for an underwater based-vehicle flexible manipulator subject to external disturbance. Combined with the Hamilton principle and variational principle, the dynamic model of underwater flexible manipulator is derived as a coupled partial differential equation-ordinary differential equations. We propose a boundary control to achieve vibration suppression and attitude and position tracking control. A hyperbolic tangent function is constructed to handle external disturbances. Boundary control given in this paper ensures the practical stability of the underwater flexible manipulator system via Lyapunov analysis.