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Paper details
Number 4 - December 2020
Volume 30 - 2020
Fault identification in underwater vehicle thrusters via sliding mode observers
Alexander Zuev, Alexey Zhirabok, Vladimir Filaretov
Abstract
The paper is devoted to the problem of increasing the efficiency of underwater vehicles by using a fault diagnosis system for
their thrusters which provides detection, isolation, and identification of minor faults. To address the problem, a two-stage
method is proposed. At the first stage, a bank of diagnostic observers is designed to detect and isolate the emerging faults.
Each observer in this bank is constructed to be sensitive to some set of faults and insensitive to others. At the second
stage, additional observers working in sliding mode are synthesized in order to accurately estimate the error value in the
signal obtained from the angular velocity sensor and to estimate deviations of the thruster parameters from their nominal
values due to the faults. In contrast to the existing solutions, reduced-order (i.e., lower-dimensional) models of the original
system are proposed as a basis to construct sliding mode observers. This approach permits reduction of the complexity of
the obtained observers in comparison with the known methods, where full-order observers are constructed. The simulation
results show the efficiency and high quality of all synthesized observers. In all cases considered, it was possible to detect
typical faults, as well as estimate their values.
Keywords
underwater vehicles, thrusters, fault identification, sliding mode observers