Robust adaptive fault‐tolerant control of dynamic positioning vessel with position reference system faults using backstepping design

Summary This paper presents a solution to guarantee a fault‐tolerant control (FTC) of dynamic positioning (DP) vessel in the presence of the position reference system (PRS) faults by using the backstepping technique. The faults modes of PRS are modeled as an additive uncertainty in the feedback loop of the DP control system, and the bounds of the additive uncertainty are unknown. Through estimating online the unknown bounds on the basis of the designed adaptive mechanism, the robust adaptive fault‐tolerant controller (RAFTC), which takes the faulty PRS measurements as the inputs, is proposed rather than detecting and isolating them. Moreover, the developed RAFTC is proved by applying Lyapunov stability theory that the closed‐loop DP control system is uniformly bounded and the tracking error can be converged to zero asymptotically despite of the PRS failures. A simulation scenario on an offshore supply vessel model is provided to validate the effectiveness of the designed RAFTC, and the results show that the RAFTC has better performance and robustness compared with the ordinary fine‐tuned adaptive backstepping controller.