On Autonomous Cooperative Underwater Floating Manipulation Systems

In this paper we present a novel co-operative control policy purely for the transportation of large objects in underwater environments using two free floating vehicles, each one endowed with a 7 d.o.f redundant manipulator. Due to the presence of harsh conditions in underwater scenarios, it is extremely important to realize algorithms that depend on a minimal amount of explicit information exchanged by the agent, or without any exchange of information at all. To achieve this goal the control policy proposed in the paper only requires the exchange of six numbers at each time instant, while however exhibiting extremely good performances, inspite of the restraints on the information exchange.