Exogenous Fault Detection and Recovery for Swarm Robotics

Abstract

A robotic swarm needs to maintain continuous operation even in the event of failure of one or more individual robots. Even with a small number of faulty robots, the time for achieving the task will be significantly increased. If the behaviors of biological systems are considered, a number of approaches based on communication, to detect damaged or injured cells or insects can be identified. In this research the transmission of position data between robots has been used as the main method of fault location. The transmission of this data permits members of a robotic swarm to identify and subsequently isolate a faulty robot, either in its drive train or position measurement system. This paper discusses the approach used and presents simulation results.