Planning to Fail: Mission Design for Modular Repairable Robot Teams

This paper presents a method using stochastic simulation to evaluate the reliability of robot teams consisting of modular robots. For an example planetary exploration mission we use this method to compare the performance of a repairable robot team with spare modules versus nonrepairable robot teams. Our results show that for this mission a repairable robot team can provide a higher probability of mission completion than a nonrepairable team, even when the nonrepairable robots are built using components with an order of magnitude greater reliability than the repairable robots.