Underwater Intervention With Remote Supervision via Satellite Communication: Developed Control Architecture and Experimental Results Within the Dexrov Project

This article presents the results of the experimental campaign of the EU-H2020 funded project DexROV. Its goal is to enable the remote operation of an underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS) via satellite communication to execute intervention tasks in an Oil&Gas industry scenario. More in detail, this work focuses on the overall control architecture that has been deployed and tested during the DexROV June 2018 experimental campaign held in Marseilles, France. The motion controller relies on a task-priority inverse kinematics algorithm that allows handling several control objectives and performing them simultaneously exploiting the system redundancy. Classical inverse kinematics algorithms have been properly extended to handle also set-based tasks, or inequality constraints, useful for the definition of several safety tasks such as joint limits or virtual walls. The control architecture also includes an admittance loop that exploits the force/torque measurements of a wrench sensor in order to make the system compliant to undesired external forces and unexpected collisions with the environment. Preparatory simulations and experimental trials are presented for proving the effectiveness of the deployed architecture in a “turn the valve” operation.