Distributed multi-agent diagnosis and recovery from sensor failures

Abstract

This paper presents work extending previous research in sensor fault tolerance, classification, and recovery from a single robot to a heterogeneous team of distributed robots. This approach allows teams of robots to share knowledge about the working environment, sensor and task state, to diagnose failures and also communicate to redistribute tasks in the event that a robot becomes inoperable. Our work presents several novel extensions to prior art: distributed fault handling and task management in a dynamic, distributed Java framework. This research was implemented and demonstrated on robots in a lab environment performing a simplified search operation.