Distributed Thrust Allocation Method for Heading Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Thrust allocation is an important part of motion control of marine crafts. Given the problem that the traditional centralized thrust allocation method has low fault tolerance, or thrust allocation fault-tolerant control requires complicated control strategy adjustment or reconstruction, a distributed thrust allocation method is proposed. Aiming at the heading control of marine crafts, this method regards the thrust allocation problem as a distributed optimization problem that each rudder cooperates to achieve the goal of global optimization. The simulation results show that this method can not only ensure effective heading control but also has good fault tolerance in the case of several typical rudder faults by comparing with the traditional centralized thrust distribution algorithm.