Adaptive fault-tolerant control allocation schemes for overactuated systems with actuator and bias faults

Fault-Tolerant control is of paramount importance in marine technology, especially for autonomously guided vehicles. It can be achieved by exploiting actuators redundancy, which adds flexibility to the system by guaranteeing maneuverability, even in the presence of actuator faults. The main idea in the control allocation scheme here proposed is at distributing the control effort among the remaining healthy actuators without changing the nominal control law. In this paper, we propose an enhanced adaptive control allocation algorithm for over actuated systems. The proposed algorithm works under actuators loss of effectiveness with possible thruster stuck situations under both input saturation and rate of change constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is shown by simulating a marine surface vehicle model on a path-following problem.