Virtual kinematic chains to solve the underwater vehicle-manipulator systems redundancy

This paper addresses the kinematics of the Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator Systems (UVMSs). Due the adittional degrees of freedom (dofs) provided by the vehicle, such systems are kinematically redundant, i.e. they possess more dofs than those required to execute a given task, and need to be solved using some redundancy technique. We present an approach based on introducing kinematic constraints. The approach uses the screw representation of movement and is based on the so-called Davies method used to solve the kinematics of closed kinematic chains. We describe the vehicle-manipulator system as ...