Adaptive recurrent neural network motion control for observation class remotely operated vehicle manipulator system with modeling uncertainty

Precise motion control of remotely operated vehicles plays an important role in a great number of submarine missions. However, the high-performance operations are difficult to realize due to the uncertainty in system modeling with self-disturbance. On the basis of the multibody system dynamics, self-disturbances from the tether and manipulator have been systematically analyzed in order to transform them into observed forces. A novel S surface–based adaptive recurrent wavelet neural network control system has been proposed on the nonlinear control of underwater vehicles, with its recurrent wavelet neural network structure designed for the approximation of the uncertain dynamics. Moreover, a robust function has been proposed to improve system robustness and convergence. The comparison shows that the remotely operated vehicle operation performance including the three-dimensional path following and vehicle-manipulator coordinate control has been greatly improved.