Null-space-based behavior guidance of planar dual-arm UVMS

Dual-arm Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator Systems are able perform a variety of interventions tasks, and there are still many challenges related to making such vehicles autonomous. This paper presents a guidance method for generating reference trajectories for such a system by considering the main manipulator and the vehicle base as a leader unit and the secondary manipulator as a follower unit. The desired behavior of the system is expressed as different tasks, and the reference trajectories are calculated using pseudo-inverse Jacobian task matrices and the null-space-based method. The proposed method has been implemented for a particular planar UVMS and simulated for a defined set of tasks. Simulation results confirm the correctness of the proposed method.