Robot Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance: A Survey

Abstract

Fault tolerance is increasingly important for robots, especially those in remote or hazardous environments. Robots need the ability to effectively detect and tolerate internal failures in order to continue performing 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 robotic systems, develops fault-tolerant control environments, and derives fault detection and error recovery techniques using hardware, kinematic, or functional redundancy. This paper presents a summary of the current, limited, state-of-the-art in fault-tolerant robotics and offers some future possibilities for the field.