A Robust Force Control Approach for Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems
This work addresses force control challenges for UVMSs in underwater operations like sampling and welding, offering a model-free approach that is incremental in its application to known bottlenecks.
The paper tackles the problem of force control for Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems (UVMSs) in interaction tasks by proposing a model-free control protocol that addresses uncertainties, disturbances, and sensor noises, resulting in improved transient and steady-state performance with reduced overshoot in force error, as verified through simulation.
In various interaction tasks using Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems (UVMSs) (e.g. sampling of the sea organisms, underwater welding), important factors such as: i) uncertainties and complexity of UVMS dynamic model ii) external disturbances (e.g. sea currents and waves) iii) imperfection and noises of measuring sensors iv) steady state performance as well as v) inferior overshoot of interaction force error, should be addressed during the force control design. Motivated by the above factors, this paper presents a model-free control protocol for force controlling of an Underwater Vehicle Manipulator System which is in contact with a compliant environment, without incorporating any knowledge of the UVMS's dynamic model, exogenous disturbances and sensor's noise model. Moreover, the transient and steady state response as well as reduction of overshooting force error are solely determined by certain designer-specified performance functions and are fully decoupled by the UVMS's dynamic model, the control gain selection, as well as the initial conditions. Finally, a simulation study clarifies the proposed method and verifies its efficiency.