Observer-based Fault Tolerant Sliding Mode Control for Remotely Operated Vehicles

This paper proposes an actuator fault-tolerant control scheme designed for a class of nonlinear systems, and then applied to an underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) used for inspection purposes. Fault detection is achieved using a Variable Structure System (VSS) observer, while a sliding-mode based approach has been used both for fault isolation and ROV control, after the application of an input decoupling nonlinear state transformation to the ROV model. Finally, control reconfiguration is performed exploiting the inherent redundancy of actuators. An extensive simulation study has been also performed, supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach.