Objectives To address frequent actuator failures caused by complex underwater environments and the inherent characteristics of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), this study investigates a prescribed performance path-following fault-tolerant control scheme for an underactuated UUV subject to ocean current disturbances, model uncertainties, and actuator faults. To ensure safe UUV navigation, a path-following fault-tolerant controller is designed by integrating an improved prescribed performance function with a barrier Lyapunov function, enabling full-state-constrained fault-tolerant control.

Methods A novel predefined-time disturbance observer is developed to estimate the lumped disturbances arising in UUV path-following, including ocean currents, parameter perturbations, unmodeled dynamics, and thrust loss caused by actuator faults. The lumped uncertainties with actuator faults are incorporated into the prescribed performance fault-tolerant controller for compensation, ensuring that all path-following state errors remain within predefined bounds.

Results  Simulation results demonstrate that the position error, attitude angle error, and angular velocity error converge rapidly while strictly satisfying the prescribed safety constraints, achieving a steady-state position error bound of 1 meter and an attitude angle error bound of 0.05 radians. When the actuators suffer up to 80% thrust loss, the disturbance observer rapidly estimates the lumped disturbances, and the controller compensates for the faults within 1 second without significant path-following deviation. The maximum transient error does not exceed 20% of the prescribed limit. These findings validate the strong robustness of the proposed method against actuator faults. By unifying disturbance observation with prescribed performance constraints, the fault-tolerant control structure is simplified, achieving both fast fault response and full-state safety guarantees.

Conclusions This work provides a universal solution for high-performance UUV navigation in complex underwater environments.