Design and Experimental Validation of an Adaptive Sliding Mode Observer-Based Fault-Tolerant Control for Underwater Vehicles

Cost and other practically related reasons can mean that velocity sensors are not available on an underwater vehicle. For such cases, the results in this brief are developed on an observer-based fault-tolerant control for underwater vehicles in the presence of external disturbances and unknown thruster faults. An adaptive sliding mode observer is developed to achieve finite-time convergence where, in comparison to a high-gain-based design for the observer, a nonlinear feedback is constructed based on the position estimation error. Unlike alternatives, a discontinuity term in the developed fault tolerant controller is avoided, and the stability of the controlled dynamics is characterized using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, these new results are supported by both a simulation-based study and experimental verification.