Adaptive Proportional-Integral Sliding Mode-Based Fault Tolerant Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with Thrusters Saturation and Potential Failure

Abstract

This paper focuses on the fault tolerant control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of dynamic uncertainties and potential thruster failure issues. For this, an adaptive proportional-integral sliding mode-based fault tolerant control (APISM-FTC) is proposed to drive the AUV to follow the desired trajectory, in the event of unknown thrusters failure and thrusters saturation. Radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) and an adaptive approach are used to evaluate the dynamics uncertainty during the construction of the APISM-FTC controller. To guarantee that all tracking errors asymptotically converge to zero, a comprehensive theoretical analysis and mathematical proof based on Lyapunov stability analysis are implemented. The simulation experiments on two fault conditions are carried out, respectively, and the control effects under normal conditions are compared. It can be shown that the designed APISM-FTC method can make the system reach a stable state quickly, and can still have a good control performance in the case of the failure of the thruster.