Underwater robots. Motion and force control of vehicle-manipulator systems. (Q1394749)

This book deals with underwater robots, their motions, force control and manipulation tasks. The manipulator is mounted on an autonomous vehicle and undergoing strongly nonlinear hydrodynamic effects. The sensory system of the vehicle must deal with a noisy and unstructured environment; the underwater electromagnetic transmission is impossible and visibility is generally poor. So from the control point of view, the underwater robots are much more challenging compared to ground robots. The book contains a wide list of underwater robots (AUVs) control problems. The mathematical model of the AUVs takes into account hydrodynamic effects on a rigid body moving in a fluid. The fluid influence is based on the concepts of an added mass, which is considered like a function of surface geometry. The added mass has also an added Coriolis and centripetal contribution. All this permits the author to reduce the AUVs' dynamics to the dynamics of rigid bodies system and avoid the complexity of difficult fluidodynamics. The author considers robotic systems with kinematic redundancy. The redundancy is useful to achieve end-effector tracking accuracy and at the same time guarantee additional energy saving and increase system manipulability. The author considers a sliding mode controller, an adaptive controller, an output-feedback controller, a virtual decomposition-based adaptive controller. The stability analysis is established using the Lyapunov stability technique. The author presents natural and digital simulations. Because the underwater environment is hostile, the sensing devices are not fully reliable in the underwater environment, so the mathematical model deals with characteristics which lead to coupled and nonlinear differential equations, where the hydrodynamic effects are not completely known. The realization of AUVs is a complex scientific problem of significant importance. And this book is a step forward in studying them.