Disturbance-Observer-Based Prescribed Performance Fault-Tolerant Trajectory Tracking Control for Ocean Bottom Flying Node

The development of marine petroleum exploitation becomes an important part of marine economy development gradually. Ocean bottom flying node (OBFN) is a kind of autonomous underwater vehicle which can explore marine petroleum and natural gas in large-scale deployment. This paper investigates the prescribed performance fault-tolerant trajectory tracking control method for an OBFN in presence of modeling uncertainties, ocean current disturbances, and thruster faults. By using a new performance function and an error transformation scheme, the proposed controller is able to achieve the desired tracking performance and the maximum convergence time is known as a priori. A disturbance observer is designed to deal with the influence of the modeling uncertainties, ocean disturbances, and thruster faults. The stability of the closed-loop OBFN system is proved by using Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulation results under different types of thruster faults illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed disturbance-observer-based prescribed performance fault-tolerant trajectory tracking controller.