Impedance Control of Dual-Arm 3-link Underwater Robot : In the Case of Grasping a Fixed Object Lightly with One Hand

Abstract

Force control system plays a crucial role in tasks involving Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System (UVMS) such as object manipulation and interaction with the unstructured underwater environment using robotic manipulators. Force control is necessary to increase the adaptability of UVMS and for reducing unexpected instabilities of the vehicle due to interaction with environment. In previous work, we have developed an impedance-based force control method for a floating UVMS that shows despite the instability of the robot body due to the force exerted on the right manipulator’s end-tip, good position control performance was obtained for the left manipulator’s end-tip. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed impedance control method through simulation in the case where the left manipulator of the UVMS is grasping a fixed object lightly, while the right manipulator makes contact with the environment such as a wall. The proposed impedance control is implemented on the right manipulator’s end-tip, while the right manipulator’s end-tip and robot body are controlled using Resolved Acceleration Control (RAC) method. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed impedance-based force control method.