Guidelines for a distributed functional and algorithmic control architecture for underwater free-flying multi-manipulators

The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the maneuvers of a non-holonomic underwater vehicle and the motion of a supported manipulation system (composed by one or two arms) when the overall system is commanded to execute a given grasping or manipulation task. Results are obtained by merging together some recent ones, relevant to the field of non-holonomic vehicle guidance and maneuvering, with those concerning the coordination of fixed base multiarm manipulation systems.