Optimal Fault-Tolerant Control for Tugboats Robust Path Following in Nearshore
Jiangteng Shi, Jun Zhang, Yujing Chen, Jia Ren
Abstract
External ocean disturbances (EODs) and internal thruster loss-of-effectiveness faults (ITLEFs) are key factors influencing the accuracy of the autonomous tugboat's path following, as well as the stability and safety of the tugboat's hull during maritime operations. To achieve robust path following for the autonomous tugboat, this paper proposes an optimal fault-tolerant control scheme. Firstly, we formulate the robust path following of the tugboat as an optimal fault-tolerance control problem. A matrixed error system for the control scheme is constructed to uniformly consider both EODs and ITLEFs. Secondly, considering the time and economic costs associated with algorithm deployment and tuning process on tugboats in real world, we present an adaptive dynamic programming algorithm to solve the proposed optimal fault-tolerance problem, which is characterized by ease of tuning. Then, the stability of the control system is proven based on the Lyapunov criterion. Finally, the proposed control scheme is evaluated under practical conditions with EODs and ITLEFs. The comparative results with backstepping-based control scheme demonstrate that the proposed control scheme exhibits more robustness for path following under EODs and ITLEFs.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2025_optimalfaulttole,
title = {Optimal Fault-Tolerant Control for Tugboats Robust Path Following in Nearshore},
author = {Jiangteng Shi and Jun Zhang and Yujing Chen and Jia Ren},
booktitle = {ICRA 2025},
year = {2025}
}