Adaptive Fault Tolerant Control Allocation Strategies for Autonomous Overactuated Vehicles

This paper presents a preliminary adaptive control allocation scheme for overactuated autonomous vehicles that is fault-tolerant with respect to actuator faults or loss of effectiveness. The main idea here is to use an ad-hoc online parameter estimator coupled with an allocation algorithm to perform on-line control reconfiguration. A simple algorithm is proposed for nonlinear discrete-time systems and its main properties are summarized for the disturbance-free case. Its effectiveness is also investigated by means of numerical simulations on an underwater vehicle.