Decentralized Impedance Control for Cooperative Manipulation of Multiple Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems under Lean Communication
This work addresses coordination challenges in underwater robotics for tasks like object manipulation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing impedance control methods.
The paper tackles cooperative object transportation for multiple underwater vehicle manipulator systems in constrained environments using only implicit communication through physical interaction, achieving efficient navigation and collision avoidance without explicit data exchange.
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative object transportation for multiple Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems (UVMSs) in a constrained workspace with static obstacles, where the coordination relies solely on implicit communication arising from the physical interaction of the robots with the commonly grasped object. We propose a novel distributed leader-follower architecture, where the leading UVMS, which has knowledge of the object's desired trajectory, tries to achieve the desired tracking behavior via an impedance control law, navigating in this way, the overall formation towards the goal configuration while avoiding collisions with the obstacles. On the other hand, the following UVMSs estimate the object's desired trajectory via a novel prescribed performance estimation law and implement a similar impedance control law. The feedback relies on each UVMS's force/torque measurements and no explicit data is exchanged online among the robots. Moreover, the control scheme adopts load sharing among the UVMSs according to their specific payload capabilities. Finally, various simulation studies clarify the proposed method and verify its efficiency.