A Model-based Active Fault Tolerant Control Scheme for a Remotely Operated Vehicle

An active failure and fault tolerant control scheme for an underwater remotely operated vehicle is proposed in this work. The proposed solution is based on a fault tolerant allocation, which takes into account an estimate of the faults on the vehicle’s thrusters for an accurate redistribution of the control effort. The diagnosis is based on a sliding mode observer, which generates three residuals and allows to evaluate the health condition of each actuator of the vehicle. The scheme can be adapted to any control law for the vehicle dynamics, and has been tested in simulation using a backstepping controller for the dynamics and with real world parameters, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed active fault tolerant control scheme.