Adaptive fault-tolerant control for an autonomous underwater vehicle

In recent years, using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for submarine missions has increased substantially. One of the problems in controlling these nonlinear devices is the possibility of a fault in the system operators. Failure causes increased operating costs and reduced vehicle performance. Therefore, the use of fault tolerance control is essential to ensure the stability and ability of the device to continue its activity. The focus of this article is on the trajectory tracking control for an underactuated AUV with actuator faults using kinematics and dynamics modeling. An adaptive rule is used as an online estimation to compensate for malfunctions in robot performance. In this regard, the adaptive fault-tolerant control plan is proposed, so that the closed-loop system is stable, and all control objectives are achievable. At first, the dynamic model of AUV with actuator fault and disturbance is described. Next, the control algorithm is designed for trajectory tracking in the presence of time-varying disturbances and actuator faults. The proposed adaptive rules will overcome disturbances and actuator faults. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the provided controller is compared with other common control methods.