Marine robotics is still in its infancy compared to the well-known industrial robot field. Many issues are open, since goals include building a robust and effective robot to making it able to autonomously move and manipulate in a very challenging environment that affects sensing and actuation, all with reduced direct human assistance.

This book focuses on underwater manipulation, a new research topic that shares many problems with mobile manipulation but presents new challenges because of the different physical rules of liquid environments. It is worth noting that this book is in its third edition, suggesting that the topic is still challenging and attracting attention. Moreover, the author has dedicated efforts, over 10 years, to refine and complete models, add new references, detail the steps in equation derivation, and develop a publicly available simulation tool to experiment with the control laws.

The book devotes just one introductory chapter to the basis of underwater robots, and then covers modeling and controlling methods. The large variety of shapes and the mechanical architectures are briefly described in chapter 2, which considers the robot as a vehicle with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) (an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)) that is eventually equipped with manipulators to obtain an underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS).

After two chapters dedicated to modeling the kinematics and dynamics of AUVs, chapter 4 surveys the fault detection schemes and strategies, with reference to experiments in the literature. Chapter 5 presents a set of real experiments.

The core of the book starts with chapter 6, which covers the kinematic control of the UVMS, and continues with chapter 7 on dynamic control; both are illustrated through equations, schemata, and many simulations. The favorite methods are the ones easily computable, such as virtual decomposition control, able to create a modular solution to reduce the complexity of the control problem. As the author concludes in chapter 7, the usual control strategies of industrial robots cannot be applied to the UVMS, so it remains a challenging area.

The next topic, in chapter 8, is interaction control, or how to make the UVMS autonomously interact with the environment, in particular to apply wanted forces and to sense contact forces. Different force control laws are discussed after simulation results, since no real-life experiments are currently available.

The last chapter is a short introduction to the simulation tool Simurv 4.0, a library for MATLAB, developed by the author to test the control rules. Appendix A reports the mathematical models of the vehicles and the three DoF and 6DoF manipulators used in the presented simulations.

The book covers decades of research results and reports them in a logically organized manner, making it ready for use and experimentation. It would be a valuable graduate-level textbook to cover the control of AUVs, a topic usually absent in teaching books on robotics. However, its target is a more advanced reader--for example, a UVMS researcher--who can use this well-organized corpus of methods either to advance UVMS controllers or to develop user interfaces, path planning, sensor integration, and communication strategies, all topics still open in UVMS development.

UVMSs are complex systems that require extensive sensing to be effective. Maybe new methods will be ready for the fourth edition of this book, allowing for a new chapter on submarine sensing and sensor integration.