A GOA-Based Fault-Tolerant Trajectory Tracking Control for an Underwater Vehicle of Multi-Thruster System without Actuator Saturation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GOA-based fault-tolerant control method for underwater vehicles that effectively manages thruster faults and actuator saturation, ensuring accurate trajectory tracking under various fault conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel fault-tolerant control strategy combining backstepping, sliding mode control, and Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm for underwater vehicles with multi-thruster systems.

Findings

Effective fault compensation in simulations with thruster damage.

Robust trajectory tracking under environmental perturbations.

Faster convergence compared to traditional FTC methods.

Abstract

This paper proposes an intelligent fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategy to tackle the trajectory tracking problem of an underwater vehicle (UV) under thruster damage (power loss) cases and meanwhile resolve the actuator saturation brought by the vehicle's physical constraints. In the proposed control strategy, the trajectory tracking component is formed by a refined backstepping algorithm that controls the velocity variation and a sliding mode control deducts the torque/force outputs; the fault-tolerant component is established based on a Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA), which provides fast convergence speed as well as satisfactory accuracy of deducting optimized reallocation of the thruster forces to compensate for the power loss in different fault cases. Simulations with or without environmental perturbations under different fault cases and comparisons to other traditional FTCs are presented, thus verifying the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed GOA-based fault-tolerant trajectory tracking design.