IngentaConnect An experimental investigation into the fault-tolerant control of ...

Authors: Podder, Tarun Kanti¹; Antonelli, Gianluca²; Sarkar, Nilanjan³

Source: Advanced Robotics, Volume 15, Number 5, 2001 , pp. 501-520(20)

Abstract:

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are expected to function in an unstructured underwater environment. One of the main requirements for effective operation in such an environment is to accommodate faults. In this paper, we have investigated a new approach to the allocation of thruster forces of an autonomous underwater vehicle under thruster faults. Generally, an AUV is equipped with more thrusters than what is minimally required to produce the desired motion. The proposed framework exploits the excess number of thrusters to accommodate thruster faults during operation. First, a redundancy resolution scheme is presented that considers the presence of excess number of thrusters along with any thruster faults and determines the reference thruster forces to produce the desired motion. These reference thruster forces are then utilized in the thruster controller to generate the required motion. This approach resolves the thruster redundancy in the Cartesian space and allows the AUV to track the task-space trajectories with asymptotic reduction of the task-space errors. Results from actual underwater experiments are provided to demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme.

Keywords: AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLE; UNDERWATER ROBOTIC SYSTEM; FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL; THRUSTER REDUNDANCY; THRUSTER FAULTS

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1163/156855301317033531

Affiliations: 1: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA 2: Dipartimento di Automazione, Elettromagnetismo, Ingegneria dell'Informazione e Matematica Industriale, Università degli Studi di Cassino, Via G. Di Biasio 43, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy 3: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA

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An experimental investigation into the fault-tolerant control of an autonomous underwater vehicle