Control and implementation of underwater vehicle manipulator system using zero moment point

Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System (UVMS) is a useful system to perform diverse and sophisticated operations under the water. However it is difficult to control the motion of UVMS due to external disturbances such as payloads holding underwater objects, currents, etc. In this paper, in order to ensure the dynamic stability of the UVMS, redundancy resolution method is proposed using a zero moment point (ZMP) algorithm. In order to evaluate the proposed ZMP algorithm and redundancy resolution method, a testbed composed of redundant manipulator was developed. The results show that ZMP algorithm helps the stability of the UVMS while the end-effector of the manipulator tracks the desired trajectory accurately.