The need for actual autonomy in underwater robotic systems is rapidly increasing. Many challenging issues derive from such a trend, one in all the requirement of coordinately controlling the motion of an underwater floating I-AUV endowing a robotic arm, to accomplish complex manipulation tasks. This work is aimed to present a strategy based on the prioritization of tasks of equality and inequality type, once combined with Dynamic Programming techniques, for coordinately controlling the motion of such I-AUV. A general algorithmic framework is developed and simulative results supporting its resulting effectiveness are presented.

The present work considers modular robotic structures equipped with an embedded control architecture and proposes a distributed kinematic inversion technique enabling the execution of manipulation operations. The presented strategy is not based on role assignments; all the modules are identical from the control point of view and can be therefore added, removed or exchanged on wish, with no impact on the overall control architecture. In addition every module has just to a-priori know a very limited set of local information while can be totally unaware about the characteristics of the remaining part of the chain. All the information needed for coordination are indeed on-line obtained through communication with other modules. No external centralized controller knowing the overall robot geometry and kinematics is necessary. More simply a global self-coordinating behaviour is autonomously established and propagated along the chain through data-exchanges.

The present work deals with complex robotic structures characterized by the presence of an embedded distributed control system. More specifically, every single joint of the kinematic chain is assumed to be equipped with a simple local processing unit for properly driving its motion. As a consequence, each joint and the associated link may be considered as a defective "1-dof only" separately controlled atomic manipulator, which is required to act in team with all the other joints, in order to accomplish a global common task specified in the operational space. In this context the paper proposes a DP-based computationally distributed kinematic inversion technique that, based on a moderate data exchange among the processing units, allows the establishment of a global self-organizing behavior. In this way it becomes possible to execute any motion task by solely exploiting the control capabilities of each local processing unit, while not requiring any centralized knowledge about the overall structure geometry and kinematics

The present work deals with manipulator arms characterized by the presence of an internal, totally distributed, embedded control system. More specifically, every single joint is assumed to be equipped with a simple local processing unit devoted to properly drive its motion, thus allowing to consider each pair constituted by a single joint and the associated link as a defective “1-dof-only”, separately controlled, atomic manipulator. In this perspective, the paper proposes an effective, computationally distributed, control technique that, based on a repeated data exchange among the processing units, establishes a global self-organizing behaviour among the joints which allows to control the motion of the end-effector of the overall arm in the operational space, by solely exploiting the control capabilities of every local processing unit, while not requiring any centralized global knowledge about the overall arm geometry and kinematics.

The present work deals with manipulator arms characterized by the presence of an embedded distributed control system. More specifically, every single joint is assumed to be equipped with a simple local processing unit for properly driving its motion. As a consequence, each joint and the associated link may be considered as a defective "1-dof only" separately controlled atomic manipulator, which is required to act in team with all the other joints in order to accomplish a global common task specified in the operational space. In this context, the paper proposes a computationally distributed kinematic inversion technique that, via the on-line application of a dynamic programming technique (based on a moderate data exchange among the processing units), allows the establishment of a global self-organizing behavior; thus allowing to optimally execute the task by solely exploiting the control capabilities of each local processing unit, while not requiring any centralized knowledge about the overall arm geometry and kinematics.

The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the manoeuvring of a non-holonomic vehicle and the motion of a supported manipulator when the overall system is commanded to execute a given grasping or manipulation task. The objective being clearly that of exploiting the extra dof's offered by the vehicle for cooperatively accomplishing to tasks that otherwise could not be executed by the arm only. Results are obtained by devising an effective technique that, while preserving system modularity, also allows system self-coordination, without explicitly keeping into account the kinematic structure of the underlying subsystems.

This paper describes the most significant design issues related with the development of an embedded FPGA-based control system for a human-like robotic hand. Specific features of the mechanical design of the system are discussed firstly, then a general approach to the problem of controlling the motion of the robotic device is provided. Finally a candidate distributed control architecture is presented.

The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the manoeuvring of a non-holonomic vehicle and the motion of a supported manipulation system (composed by one or two arms) when the overall system is commanded to execute a given grasping or manipulation task. The objective being clearly that of suitably exploiting the extra dof's offered by the vehicle for better accomplishing the assigned task in a cooperative way.