Active fault tolerant control of an unmanned surface vehicle

This paper presents an active fault tolerant control methodology with application to an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). Firstly, an augmented linear quadratic regulator (LQR) scheme is developed to guarantee the desired control performance and stability of USV in the absence of actuator faults. Secondly, an additional control mechanism incorporating a fault estimator and an adaptive fault compensator are synthesized to asymptotically stabilize the closed-loop system in the event of actuator faults. Based on a nonlinear USV model, simulation results validated the effectiveness of the proposed control approach in either the absence or presence of actuator faults.