Force control of a water-surface robot utilizing vehicle restoring force

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 vehicl e. In this research, the relationship between thruster outputs and the cont act 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, a simulator of the vehicle motion is develope d and the results of experiments using this simulator illustrate the validi ty of the proposed algorithm.