Enhancing autonomy: Fault detection, identification and optimal reaction for over - Actuated AUVs

The adoption of fault detection and isolation (FDI) techniques is fundamental to ensure high levels of safety and productivity, especially in critical and expensive applications like Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). This paper describes a comparison between different techniques available in the literature, applied to over-actuated AUVs under single fault condition (SFC) and considering only abrupt faults. The main contribution of this work is twofold: first, we show how such techniques can be adapted to the case of over actuated AUVs in order to isolate and identify a faulty situation of one thruster. Moreover, we give a means for robust fault reaction by using an optimal control allocation problem, which is tightly coupled with the FDI algorithm. The proposed work is in the framework of the V - Fides project and the algorithms are demonstrated in simulation, employing the dynamical model of that vehicle