Practical Fixed-Time Adaptive NN Fault-Tolerant Control for Underactuated AUVs With Input Quantization and Unknown Dead Zone

In this article, a practical fixed-time adaptive neural network (NN) trajectory tracking control scheme for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) subject to uncertain dynamics, unknown time-varying disturbances, an unknown dead zone, actuator faults and input quantization is developed for the first time. Here, a hysteresis quantizer is introduced to decrease the oscillation in the signal quantization process. Then, the radial basis function NN is employed to compensate the uncertainty term in the AUVs trajectory tracking control system. By incorporating the bounded estimate, smoothing functions and parameter adaptive technique, the problem of unknown dead zone, actuator fault and input quantization are addressed. The restrictive conditions of boundedness for the disturbance-like item in conventional sector bounded quantizer is resolved. Subsequently, a practical fixed-time adaptive NN trajectory tracking control law is designed does not require any parameter information of the quantizer under the backstepping design framework. The theoretical analysis further confirms that all signals in the AUV trajectory tracking closed-loop control system remain bounded, and the developed control scheme is shown to be effective through simulation results.