Integrated Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Control for Dynamic Positioning of Ships

An integrated fault estimation and fault-tolerant control scheme is developed in this paper for dynamic positioning of ships in the presence of an actuator fault. First, an auxiliary derivative output of dynamic positioning ships is constructed in order to satisfy the so-called observer matching condition, and a high-gain observer is designed to exactly estimate the auxiliary derivative outputs. Then, a fault-tolerant controller is developed for dynamic positioning ships based on the iterative learning observer. By means of Lyapunov–Krasovskii stability theory, it is proved that the proposed fault-tolerant controller is able to estimate the total fault effects and states of ships accurately via the iterative learning observer and also to stabilize the closed-loop system. In addition, the parameter design of the proposed fault-tolerant control system can be conveniently solved in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, simulation studies for dynamic positioning ships with actuator faults are carried out, and the results validate the effectivity of the proposed fault-tolerant control scheme.