Adaptive fault-tolerant control for longitudinal motion of supercavitating vehicles

Abstract A supercavitating underwater vehicle uses gas or vapor to reduce its skin friction enabling it travel up speeds of 200 m/s. However, traveling at extreme can be challenging for control design since sudden disturbances faults, even a short time, lead large deviations from the reference trajectory. This paper addresses problem controlling which incorporates actuator constraints and loss effectiveness cavitator. An adaptive law is designed based on backstepping method includes an fault-tolerant component. The bounded update estimate upper bound unknown total uncertainties including those induced by faults. proposed shown guarantee stability in presence faults using Lyapunov theory.