Task and motion planning for subsea manipulators in an unstructured environment

Describes ongoing work which aims to research and evaluate a two manipulator system capable of executing simple and typical underwater tasks using only supervisory control by an operator. His role, therefore, is to interact with the system to specify tasks, rather than to directly control both sets of manipulator joint angles manually through a master-slave arrangement. Thus, for time consuming and tedious tasks traditionally requiring high levels of concentration (inspection, grinding, assembly), it is expected that an increased level of automation will improve the accuracy and reduce the time taken in executing the task. Furthermore, as systems operate in increasingly deeper water depths, it helps to reduce the reliance on the umbilical cable for high bandwidth telemetry, leading perhaps in the direction of tetherless systems. The simultaneous operation of two manipulators within the same workspace in such an automated system may substantially enhance the system capability, perhaps leading to a more generic facility of use for a greater variety of tasks