An Approach to Trajectory Planning for Underwater Redundant Manipulator Considering Hydrodynamic Effects

This article considers motion planning of a redundant serial link manipulator in fully submerged underwater scenario in the presence of obstacles, modelled as point objects. The proposed trajectory planning is based on minimizing the energy required in overcoming the hydrodynamic effects, and in the same time avoiding both obstacles and singularities. The presence of redundancy in joint space enables to choose optimal sequence of configurations and associated motion rates. The proposed approach is applied for motion planning of a three degrees-of-freedom planar manipulator avoiding a point obstacle and solved.