ROBOTIC FAULT-DETECTION AND FAULT-TOLERANCE - A SURVEY

Fault tolerance is increasingly important for robots, especially those in remote or hazardous environments. Robots need the ability to effec tively detect and tolerate internal failures in order to continue perf orming their tasks without the need for immediate human intervention. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in robot fault tolerance, and the subject has been investigated from a number of points of view . Ongoing research performs off-line and on-line failure analyses of r obotic systems, develops fault-tolerant control environments, and deri ves fault detection and error recovery techniques using hardware, kine matic, or functional redundancy. This paper presents a summary of the current, limited, state-of-the-art in fault-tolerant robotics and offe rs some future possibilities for the field.