Visual Servoing of a Redundant Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System Using Receding Horizon Control

In recent years, underwater vehicle-manipulator systems (UVMSs), which are composed of free-moving underwater bodies and multiple degrees-of-freedom manipulators attached on the bodies, have attracted great interests in the fields of robotics and ocean engineering. In this paper, a visual servoing scheme is proposed by using receding horizon control (RHC) to control the UVMS end-effector, which is expected to complete a wide variety of interventional tasks. Firstly, the UVMS kinematic model of visual servoing is developed to describe the relationship between the image of feature points obtained by an eye-in-hand camera and the velocities of a UVMS. With consideration of system constraints, RHC is designed based on this model to make the current image approach to the desired one, which is obtained by the UVMS at the desired position. In the RHC, the cost function are properly defined by incorporating image errors and velocity inputs, and the field-of-view constraint is considered. The effectiveness of the proposed RHC-based visual servo control is tested by the simulation experiments, in which the end-effector successfully moves the desired position with visual feedback.