Adaptive control of underwater vehicle-manipulator systems subject to joint limits

The control of underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS) is a challenging task because the dynamics of such a system is highly nonlinear, coupled, time-varying, and subject to hydrodynamic uncertainties and external disturbances. The paper presents a non-regressor based adaptive control for UVMS where centralized and coordinated trajectory planning is followed by decentralized control-one for the slower subsystem (vehicle) and other for the faster subsystem (manipulator). To avoid joint limits, kinematic redundancy of the system is resolved using the weighted pseudoinverse of the Jacobian matrix. The results from computer simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed method