Experiments in Robotic Self-Repair: A 3D Printer Repairs Its Own Timing Pulley

Abstract

We observe an experiment for self-repair in robots that can fabricate their own parts. A challenge emerges when imperfections or degradations in the robot impact its ability to fabricate ideal components to guarantee self-repair. In the proposed experiment, we start with a defective or degraded component. We do not fabricate an ideal part initially, but only after a sequence of increasing-in-quality parts. We construct and validate two mathematical models to describe the experiment and match the observations. We observe convergence to the ideal part in all experiments and models, thus restoring the capability for self-repair to the robot.