Abstract For autonomous manipulation in water, an underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS) should be able to generate trajectori9es for the vehicle and manipulators and track the planned trajectories accurately. In this paper, for trajectory generation, we suggest a performance index for redundancy resolution. This index is designed to minimize the restoring moments of the UVMS during manipulation, and it is optimized without impeding the performance of a given task. As a result, the restoring moments of the UVMS are decreased, and control efforts are also reduced. For tracking control of the UVMS, a nonlinear H ∞ optimal control with disturbance observer is proposed. This control is robust against parameter uncertainties, external disturbances, and actuator nonlinearities. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed coordinated motion control of the UVMS. The results show that control inputs for tracking are reduced, and the UVMS can successfully track generated trajectories.