Dynamic surface fault tolerant control for underwater remotely operated vehicles

In this paper, we present a two stages actuator Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) strategy for the trajectory tracking of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). Dynamic Surface Control (DSC) is used to generate the moment and forces required by the vehicle to perform the desired motion. In the second stage of the control system, a fault tolerant thruster allocation policy is employed to distribute moment and forces among the thrusters. Exhaustive simulations have been carried out in order to compare the performance of the proposed solution with respect to different control techniques (i.e., PID, backstepping and sliding mode approaches). Saturations, actuator dynamics, sensor noises and time discretization are considered, in fault-free and faulty conditions. Furthermore, in order to provide a fair and exhaustive comparison of the control techniques, the same meta-heuristic approach, namely Artificial Bee Colony algorithm (ABC), has been employed to tune the controllers parameters.