Fault-tolerant Control of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles with Continuous Faults: Simulations and Experiments

A novel thruster fault diagnosis and accommodation method for open-frame underwater vehicles is presented in the paper. The proposed system consists of two units: a fault diagnosis unit and a fault accommodation unit. In the fault diagnosis unit an ICMAC (Improved Credit Assignment Cerebellar Model Articulation Controllers) neural network information fusion model is used to realize the fault identification of the thruster. The fault accommodation unit is based on direct calculations of moment and the result of fault identification is used to find the solution of the control allocation problem. The approach resolves the continuous faulty identification of the UV. Results from the experiment are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed method in uncertain continuous faulty situation.