Efficient dynamic simulation of an unmanned underwater vehicle with a manipulator

In this paper, an efficient dynamic simulation algorithm is developed for an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) with a robotic manipulator. It is based on an efficient O(N) algorithm where N is the number of links in the manipulator, and has been extended to include the full effects of a mobile base and various hydrodynamic forces that are exerted on these systems in underwater environments. The effects modeled in this paper are added mass, viscous drag, fluid acceleration, and buoyancy forces. With efficient implementation of the resulting algorithm, the amount of computation including hydrodynamics almost doubles over the original algorithm for a six degree-of-freedom land-based manipulator with a mobile base. Nevertheless, the amount of computation still only grows linearly with the number of links in the manipulator