Fault tolerant control of UMV based on sliding mode output feedback

Abstract This paper designs the robust fault tolerant controller for unmanned marine vehicle (UMV) systems with thruster faults and external disturbances via sliding mode output feedback. A comprehensive and unified fault model including thruster partial, complete and stuck faults is built for the first time. Based on input matrix full-rank decomposition technique and H∞ technique, a sufficient condition of sliding mode in the form of linear matrix inequality (LMI) is given. Then taking advantage of adaptive mechanism, a nonlinear discontinuous control term and an output feedback controller are aimed to reduce the oscillation amplitudes of the yaw velocity error and the yaw angle. Compared with the existing methods, the general faults including time-varying stuck fault can be dealt with. Eventually, the comparative simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness and feasibility of the presented strategy in this paper.