Dynamic Simulation of Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems

Control of Underwater vehicle manipulator systems (UVMS) are limited to human intervened tele operation in almost all practical applications. Extending these missions to autonomous or semi autonomous operation requires accurate dynamic modeling of the system. Such modeling assists system design and controller testing of autonomous UVMS. The study performs a dynamic analysis to capture relative contributions of manipulator inertial forces, static forces and hydrodynamic forces which constitute as the overall coupling forces on the vehicle. A system with a three degree of freedom manipulator was modeled using a recursive Newton euler approach. Hydrodynamic effects and coupling effects between vehicle and manipulator were introduced using models proposed by previous research. The system was simulated for a task with increasing speeds. It was observed that all dynamic Forces introduce significant coupling in high speeds. At low speeds only static and hydrodynamic moments has significant effects. Further improvements to the model are discussed with future work on the study.