Fault feature extraction and fusion method for AUV with weak thruster fault based on variational mode decomposition...

This study investigated the fault feature extraction and fusion problem for autonomous underwater vehicles with weak thruster faults. The conventional fault feature extraction and fusion method is effective when thruster faults are serious. However, for a weak thruster fault, that is, when the loss of effectiveness of thrusters is less than 10%, the following two problems occur if the conventional method is used. First, the ratio of fault features to noise features is small. Second, there is no monotonic relationship between the fusion fault features fused by the conventional method and the fault severity. In this paper, the following two methods are proposed to solve this problem: 1) Fault-feature extraction method. Based on negentropy, this method improves the evaluation index of the parameter optimization of the modified variational mode decomposition and finally enhances the fault features extracted by the modified Bayesian classification algorithm. 2) Fault-feature fusion method. To create a monotonic relationship between the fusion fault features and fault severity, this method expands the number of original signals of the traditional fusion method based on D-S evidence theory, improves the focus element of the traditional fusion method, and adopts the strategy of double fusion. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by pool-experiment results on Beaver II prototype.