Fault-tolerant region-based control of an underwater vehicle with kinematically redundant thrusters

This paper presents a new control approach for an underwater vehicle with a kinematically redundant thruster system. This control scheme is derived based on a fault-tolerant decomposition for thruster force allocation and a region control scheme for the tracking objective. Given a redundant thruster system, that is, six or more pairs of thrusters are used, the proposed redundancy resolution and region control scheme determine the number of thruster faults, as well as providing the reference thruster forces in order to keep the underwater vehicle within the desired region. The stability of the presented control law is proven in the sense of a Lyapunov function. Numerical simulations are performed with an omnidirectional underwater vehicle and the results of the proposed scheme illustrate the effectiveness in terms of optimizing the thruster forces.