Fault-tolerant System Design of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Odin: an Experimental Study

This paper describes the design and implementation of a fault-tolerant system for Omni-Directional Intelligent Navigator (ODIN), a six-degree-of-freedom autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) designed at the University of Hawaii. A fault-tolerant system consists of three areas: fault detection, fault isolation and fault accommodation. Each area is described, and methods discussed in the literaturearebriefly reviewed. The presented design focuses on the thruster (or actuator) and sensor system failures in an AUV. Experimental results show that the presented approach is practical and effective when tolerable failures in actuators and sensors occur. This methodology and concept can be extended to fault-tolerant system design for various AUVs with hardware redundancy.