Fault-Tolerant Control for AUVs Using a Single Thruster

The present paper presents a fault-tolerant control for an AUV in the presence of a critical failure in the actuators that may require an emergency operation to recover it or to drive it to a safe point. In this context, the control scheme proposed deals with a single thruster in operational conditions to command the vehicle towards a desired direction and reach a safe target point. In addition, the AUV is commanded with only two control actions on the available thruster, driving the vehicle through the desired direction following a spiral-like path and keeping it within the neighbourhood of the target point. The fault-tolerant control proposed is simple and robust enough to be applied to multiple kinds of AUVs without the need of accurate parameter design. The stability and well performance of the control scheme proposed is analytically demonstrated, and simulation examples illustrate the key results derived.