Dexterous underwater object manipulation via multi-robot cooperating systems

The complete design and realization of an underwater manipulation system composed of two cooperating arms has been one of the main goals of the AMADEUS Phase II project, within the framework of the MAST III program on Marine Technology development. In this paper, the directions and methodologies followed within the design of the complete functional and algorithmic control architecture for the workcell is presented in some details, by mainly focusing on its various aspects of modularity, scalability and composability, which presently allow the execution of many different, cooperative, object manipulation tasks.