Adaptive fault-tolerant control for a class of remotely operated vehicles under thruster redundancy

For a class of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) with redundant thrusters, an adaptive fault-tolerant controller was addressed in this paper. Considering three categories of thruster faults, a fault model was established, and an adaptive controller based on radial basis function (RBF) neural networks sliding mode method was designed. Due to the ROVs are thruster redundancy, a thrust allocation method with the principle of yaw moment priority was proposed. It was proved that the trajectory tracking errors of in the inertial coordinate were uniformly ultimately bounded based on Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, based on a ROV mathematical model, the simulations were carried out in Matlab environment to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.