Many sensors, one robot

Abstract

The author presents important issues in designing fault tolerant systems for autonomous robots. The author also presents the fault tolerance capabilities implemented on the autonomous robot. To tolerate hardware failures, a set of fault tolerance processes are written for each component. These processes are responsible for detecting faults in their respective component, and minimizing the impact of the failure on the robot's performance. The author tested the capabilities of this system by physically disabling and enabling the robot's sensors and actuators. It is found that the system recognizes and compensates for sensor and actuator failures with a fast response time.