A fault-tolerant control scheme for a hovering underwater vehicle subject to region function formulation

Abstract

This paper presents a new technique to control a hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) mounted with four horizontal and four vertical thrusters. In this control scheme, fault tolerant decomposition and region based control schemes for tracking purposes are used. A Lyapunov-like function is presented for convergence analysis of the proposed control law. Based on numerical simulations, the performance of conventional tracking control and the proposed technique is presented concerning two cases: the first case is with no thruster faults and the second case is where any one of the four horizontal thrusters is faulty and any one of the four vertical thrusters is faulty.