Compensation of Hydraulic Drag for an Underwater Manipulator Using a Real-Time SPH Fluid Simulator: Application in a Master-Slave Tele-operation

摘要

This paper discusses a control method of a tele-operation system for an underwater manipulator robot. Since fluid drag affects the dynamics of the underwater manipulator and degrades the accuracy of the control, it is necessary to decrease the influence of water. Generally, in order to compensate the fluid drag, theoretical approaches are used, but the applications are restricted by the simple modeling of the robot. Instead, we adopt a method to compensate the drag using a real-time fluid simulation. By using the simulation, the method can be applied to a robot with a complicated shape. For the method, we develop a real-time fluid simulator using smoothed particle hydrodynamics. The simulator calculates the fluid drag with the position of the underwater manipulator, and the drag is fed back to the controller to eliminate the real fluid drag. Finally, experiments have been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.