Actuator Failure Tolerant Control Design for Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles

This paper proposes an actuator fault-tolerant control scheme, composed of the usual modules performing detection, isolation, accommodation, designed for a class of nonlinear systems, and then applied to an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) used for inspection purposes. Detection is in charge of a residual generation module, while a sliding-mode based approach has been used both for ROV control and fault detection, after the application of an input decoupling nonlinear state transformation to the ROV model. Finally, control reconfiguration is performed exploiting the inherent redundancy of actuators. An extensive simulation study has been also performed, supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach.