Recognizing Hardware Faults on Mobile Robots Using Situation Analysis Techniques

Current research in the field of robotics deals with planning and executing of increasingly complex tasks as well as applications in which autonomous mobile robot systems interact with highly dynamic environments. In order to operate successfully in a highly dynamic physical world a mobile robot needs awareness to adapt its behavior according to the environment. This awareness also has to cope with uncertainty due to imperfect hardware sensors and actuators or network delays of the robot itself. Thus another important ability of a mobile robot is to ”understand” its internal state to detect any kind of hardware faults in the system. In this work a highly customizable framework for situation awareness is presented. For the evaluation of this framework we take advantage of its generality and assume fault diagnosis as a more specific subclass of the general situation awareness process to extend the situation detection framework for fault detection and diagnosis in a multi robot system.