Reliability Analysis and Improvement of FPGA-Based Robot Controller

Abstract

Faults occurring in the safety-critical systems can lead to the failure of the whole system and cause high economical losses or endanger human health. As an example, space, aerospace or medical systems which are working in the environment with increased occurrence of faults can serve. Fault avoidance and fault tolerance are the main techniques, the goal of which is to avoid such situations. This paper is the continuation of the previously published work and presents an approach to evaluate fault tolerance techniques by monitoring the impact of faults in the experimental electro-mechanical system which consists of the robot in a maze and its robot controller. The experiments with the robot controller hardened against faults are combined with the reliability analysis on a theoretical level in this paper. The impact of faults artificially injected into the robot controller, in which Triple Modular Redundancy is applied, is monitored and used for statistic reliability analysis.