FATCAR-AUV: Fault Tolerant Control Architecture of AUV

Due to versatility, compact size, independence and covertness, autonomous underwater vehicles are a highly valuable asset in the underwater battle space. Possible missions for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) range from dedicated and organic mine counter measure (MCM), rapid environmental assessment, and special operations to reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence. The wide range of possible applications and their partly contradictory nature calls for a complex control architecture, which consequently increases the possibility of components and systems failure, for which fault tolerant architecture is required. In this paper not only the hardware requirements of AUVs are mentioned (section-I) but also the principles of fault tolerant control system (section-II) are extended, keeping in view the diverse and sundry requirement of AUVs. In the end the reliability block diagram (RBD) analysis (section-III) of the proposed architecture is presented which shows extend of fault tolerance incorporated by using this architecture.