Estimation of External Force acting on Underwater Robots

In the context of robotics, accurately estimating external forces is essential. These estimations play a crucial role in collision detection, motion planning, robot control, disturbance compensation, environmental interactions, etc. Given the importance of external force estimation, We introduce a framework to estimate the forces acting on underwater robots. By leveraging dynamic models of the underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV), our framework predicts and estimates forces based on velocity and acceleration data. We conducted real-world experiments on BlueROV2 underwater vehicle to test and verify the efficacy of our proposed framework. We determined that our framework can predict the external forces with an MAE of 0.8 N.