Shen, Chong (Zhejiang University), Wang, Yichen (Zhejiang University), Yu, Zilu (Zhejiang University), Huang, Fanghao (Zhejiang University), Mei, Deqing (Zhejiang University), Chen, Zheng (Zhejiang University)

The Autonomous Swaying Compensation for Underwater Teleoperated Manipulation

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Underwater Robots" (FrAT4), Friday, July 18, 2025, 11:20−11:40, Room 108

Joint 10th IFAC Symposium on Mechatronic Systems and 14th Symposium on Robotics, July 15-18, 2025, Paris, France

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on August 2, 2025

Abstract

Mounted on remotely operated vehicles (ROV), underwater manipulators are extensively utilized in various tasks. However, under the inevitable fluid influence, the ROV may sway together with the manipulator base, which would stress the human operator in traditional teleoperation when manually compensating the swaying effects. To overcome the swaying and improve the efficiency of underwater teleoperated manipulation, the autonomous swaying compensation is proposed to cooperate with teleoperation in this paper. The inertial measurement unit (IMU) and underwater camera, generally equipped by ROVs, are fully utilized to estimate the base swaying. The autonomous swaying compensation is then implemented together with the design of virtual force feedback, which further assists the human operator in teleoperation. As a result, the human operator's burden of manually compensating the base swaying is effectively relieved, while the haptic hints generated by the virtual force feedback are additionally provided to enhance system safety. In comparative experiments, the effectiveness of proposed compensation is demonstrated, and the efficiency is significantly improved during the teleoperated manipulation. Overall, the proposed autonomous swaying compensation is promising to improve the performance of underwater teleoperated manipulation, especially under the effects of ROV swaying.