Autonomous trajectory planning for an underwater electric manipulator based on force sensing

Efficiency and accuracy could be improved by greater degree of automation in underwater tasks operating. However, there is a prerequisite that the manipulator should have a desired end-effector trajectory and suitable force applied to the environment to avoid the possibility of damage to the manipulator, object, or both. To reduce position and orientation deviation of the end-effector of a 7-function underwater electric manipulator, caused by the joints angle control error, an online adjustment algorithm based on force sensing for the autonomous trajectory planning is researched. The end-effector position and orientation deviation become smaller than the offline planning without force sensing when using same controller to operate the manipulator system. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been emphatically compared and verified through simulation experiments in this paper, and the results are reported in detail