EFFICIENT DYNAMIC SIMULATION OF AN UNDERWATER VEHICLE WITH A ROBOTIC MANIPULATOR

In this paper, an efficient dynamic simulation algorithm is developed for an underwater robotic vehicle (URV) with a manipulator, It is base d on previous work on efficient O(N) algorithms, where N is the number of links in the manipulator, and has been extended to include the eff ects of a mobile base (the URV body), In addition, the various hydrody namic fortes exerted on these systems in underwater environments are a lso incorporated into the simulation, The effects modeled in this work are added mass, viscous drag, fluid acceleration, and buoyancy fortes , With efficient implementation of the resulting algorithm, the amount of computation with inclusion of the hydrodynamics is almost double t hat of the original algorithm for a six degree-of-freedom land-based m anipulator with a mobile base, Nevertheless, the amount of computation still only grows linearly with the number of degrees of freedom in th e manipulator.