# Design, Kinematics, and Deployment of a Continuum Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel continuum underwater vehicle-manipulator system, detailing its design, kinematic modeling, and deployment, including both teleoperation and autonomous control in real-world experiments.

## Contribution

It presents the mechanical, electrical, and software design of a continuum-UVMS with a derived kinematic model and optimized trajectory algorithms, advancing underwater robotic manipulation capabilities.

## Key findings

- Successful kinematic simulation validation
- Effective trajectory optimization methods demonstrated
- Experimental deployment with teleoperation and autonomous control

## Abstract

Underwater vehicle-manipulator systems (UVMSs) are underwater robots equipped with one or more manipulators to perform intervention missions. This paper provides the mechanical, electrical, and software design of a novel UVMS equipped with a continuum manipulator, referred to as a continuum-UVMS. A kinematic model for the continuum-UVMS is derived in order to build an algorithm to resolve the robot's redundancy and generate joint space commands. Different methods to optimize the trajectory for specific tasks are proposed using both the weighted least norm solution and the gradient projection method. Kinematic simulation results are analyzed to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm. Finally, the continuum-UVMS is deployed in an experimental demonstration in which both teleoperation and autonomous control are tested for a given reference trajectory.