Active Fault-Tolerant Control for Path Following of Unmanned Surface Vehicle

In this paper a solution to the problem of active fault-tolerant control for path following of underactuated surface vessels with rudderless double thrusters is studied. The control method proposed can guarantee that the underactuated surface vessels accurately follow the given path even in case of partial gain loss of the actuator. The closed-loop system is verified to be uniformly bounded by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, the simulation experiment is presented to display that the developed fault-tolerant control method is effective in fault detection, estimation, and controller reconfiguration for cancelling the adverse effects of gain loss of thrusters in path following task.