Fault tolerant decomposition of thruster forces of an autonomous underwater vehicle

An approach to the decomposition of thruster forces of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is investigated. Generally, the number of thrusters is more than what is minimally required to produce the desired motion. We investigate how to exploit the excess number of thrusters to accommodate thruster faults during operation. First, a redundancy resolution scheme is presented that takes into account the presence of excess number of thrusters and distributes the thruster forces to produce the desired motion. Then we propose a general framework that accommodates thruster faults and allows the AUV to trade task-space trajectories with asymptotic reduction of task-space errors. Results from computer simulations are provided to demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme