Thrust Allocation Control of an Underwater Vehicle with a Redundant Thruster Configuration

Liping Deng and Jianguo Tao ()
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Liping Deng: State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150080, China
Jianguo Tao: State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150080, China

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-21

Abstract: This paper presents a fault-tolerant thruster configuration scheme and a thrust control allocation strategy for an underwater vehicle. First, to accommodate the vehicle’s flexible spatial motion capabilities and address potential thruster failures, an 8-thruster vector arrangement is designed, and the impact of thruster failures on vehicle maneuverability is analyzed. Based on this configuration, a mathematical model of the vector propulsion system is then developed, establishing the relationship between the thrust generated by the individual thrusters and the virtual control forces applied to the vehicle’s 6 degrees of freedom (DOF). Subsequently, a thrust allocation strategy based on quadratic programming (QP) is proposed to optimize thrust allocation, enhancing energy efficiency while satisfying thrust saturation constraints. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed thruster configuration exhibits strong fault-tolerance. Moreover, compared to the least squares (LS) method based on the pseudo-inverse of the configuration matrix, the QP-based thrust allocation strategy achieves significantly better energy-saving performance.

Keywords: thruster allocation; thruster configuration; quadratic programming; underwater vehicle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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