A novel non-fragile [formula omitted] fault-tolerant course-keeping control for uncertain unmanned surface vehicles with rudder failures.

This paper investigates the problem of non-fragile H ∞ fault-tolerant course-keeping control (NFC) for uncertain unmanned surface vehicles (UUSV) with rudder failures. Firstly, due to the inevitable parameter perturbations in practice, the unmanned surface vehicles (USV) is modeled as a kind of uncertain Nomoto model, and an uncertain second-order under-damped system is used to describe the rudder system. Next, considering the distribution characteristic of failures, a distribution-dependent stochastic failure model is established and incorporated into the controller design. In order to investigate the fragile problems of the controller, a new non-fragile fault-tolerant scheme is given against multiplicative and additive controller gain perturbations. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified via two numerical examples. • A novel non-fragile H ∞ fault-tolerant course-keeping control for uncertain unmanned surface vehicles(USV) with rudder failures is proposed. • A uncertain Nomoto model and a uncertain second-order underdamped system are used to describe the USV system and rudder system respectively. • Based on the distribution characteristic of failures, a distribution-dependent stochastic failure model is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]