Fault identification in underwater vehicle thrusters via sliding mode observers

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.