Fault-tolerant control based on adaptive sliding mode for underwater vehicle with thruster fault

An adaptive sliding mode backstepping fault-tolerant control is proposed for autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV) with thruster faults. Thruster faults are treated as uncertainties. Gaussian radial-basis-function networks are used to approximate these general uncertainties. In addtion, no Fault Detection and Diagnosis unit is needed in the proposed method.The controller can guarantee closed-stability regardless of thruster fault occurs or not. Due to the controlled system is strict-feedback in the traditional backstepping scheme, an improved backstepping scheme integrating with adaptive sliding mode algorithm. Finally, simulations are carried out to verify the validity of the proposed strategy.