A Virtual-Decomposition Based Approach to Adaptive Control of Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator Systems

| An adaptive control law for the end-e ector tracking problem of underwater vehicle-manipulator systems is presented in this paper. By exploiting the serialchain multibody mechanical structure, the overall control problem is decomposed in a set of elementary control problems, each of them formulated with respect to a single rigid body in the system. The proposed approach results in a modular control scheme which simpli es the application to vehicles carrying a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, reduces the required computational load, and allows eÆcient implementation on distributed computing architectures. Furthermore, the occurrence of kinematic and representation singularities is overcome, respectively, by expressing the control law in bodyxed coordinates and representing the attitude via the unit quaternion.