Advanced control of manipulator/vehicle system floating on the water

This paper presents a force control strategy for a water-surface robot. The control strategy reduces the number of vehicle actuators required for the force control by utilizing the restoring force/moment applied to the vehicle. In this research, the relationship between thruster outputs and the contact force/moment at the endpoint is derived taking the restoring force into account, and the range of the realizable contact force is calculated using this relationship. Moreover, an experimental system of robot on the water is introduced in this paper.