Control of underwater vehicle/manipulator with composite dynamics

This paper is devoted to the problem of control design of an underwater vehicle/manipulator (UVM) system composed of a free navigating platform equipped with a robot manipulator. This composite system is driven by actuators and sensors of different nature having substantially different bandwidth characteristics. Such a difference allows for a setup which can naturally treated by standard singular perturbation theory. The mayor finding here is that the computed torque control law can be substantially simplified while preserving the closed-loop stability, in the sense of perturbation theory.