End-Effector Tracking Control for an Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System with Prescribed Transient Performance

This paper investigates the tracking control for the end-effector of the UVMS manipulator, whose base (an underwater vehicle) is floating and dyanmics is coupling. An integrated control method is proposed such that the vehicle and manipulator of the UVMS are cooperative to achieve the common end-effector tracking objective as a whole. Moreover, prescribed transient performance and robust performance are considered and the corresponding controller is proposed, which consisting of the transformed tracking errors, damping term, compensation terms and uncertainty estimation term. Based on Lyapunov theory and nonlinear transformation, we prove that the prescribed transient constraints will not violated for the closed-loop system. Finally, a simulation example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.