Experimental study of fault-tolerant system design for underwater robots

Abstract

Describes the design and implementation of a fault tolerant system for the 6 degrees-of-freedom ODIN autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Fault tolerant system design can be divided into three areas: fault detection, fault isolation, and fault accommodation. This paper summarizes previous studies in fault tolerant system design and presents a fault tolerant system design for thruster (actuator) and sensor failure in AUVs. The presented system was implemented in the actual vehicle, ODIN, and its effectiveness was evaluated with experimental results.