2026-04-13T03:01:55Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request

oai:recercat.cat:10256/203072024-05-22T09:50:43Zcom_2072_452955com_2072_2054col_2072_452957

00925njm 22002777a 4500 dc Pi Roig, Roger author Cieśląk, Patryk author Ridao Rodríguez, Pere author Sanz, Pedro José author 2021-03-02 Underwater Inspection, Maintenance, and Repair operations are nowadays performed using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) deployed from dynamic-positioning vessels, having high daily opera- tional costs. During the last twenty years, the research community has been making an effort to design new Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (I-AUV), which could, in the near future, replace the ROVs, significantly decreasing these costs. Until now, the experimental work using I-AUVs has been limited to a few single-vehicle interventions, including object search and recovery, valve turning, and hot stab operations. More complex scenarios usually require the cooperation of multiple agents, i.e., the transportation of large and heavy objects. Moreover, using small, autonomous vehicles requires consideration of their limited load capacity and limited manipulation force/torque capabilities. Following the idea of multi-agent systems, in this paper we propose a possible solution: using a group of cooperating I-AUVs, thus sharing the load and optimizing the stress exerted on the manipulators. Specifically, we tackle the problem of transporting a long pipe. The presented ideas are based on a decentralized Task-Priority kinematic control algorithm adapted for the highly limited communication bandwidth available underwater. The aforementioned pipe is transported following a sequence of poses. A path-following algorithm computes the desired velocities for the robots’ end-effectors, and the on-board controllers ensure tracking of these setpoints, taking into account the geometry of the pipe and the vehicles’ limitations. The utilized algorithms and their practical implementation are discussed in detail and validated through extensive simulations and experimental trials performed in a test tank using two 8 DOF I-AUVs This work was supported in part by the TWINBOT ’’TWIN ROBOTS FOR COOPERATIVE UNDERWATER INTERVENTION MISSIONS’’ Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of economy, industry, and competitiveness, under Grant DPI2017-86372-C3, in part by the Valencian Government (CIRTESU Project) under Grant IDIFEDER/2018/013, and in part by the Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya under Grant 2019FI_B_00812 http://hdl.handle.net/10256/20307 Vehicles submergibles Submersibles Robots autònoms Autonomous robots TWINBOT: Autonomous Underwater Cooperative Transportation