This research, in the Small Grants for Exploratory Research mode, investigates the area of fault tolerance for robotics. This activity has produced a series of potentially valuable individual ethods. The goal of this project is to develop the foundations for a rigorous approach to robotic fault tolerance. The research involves synthesis of a protective operating system shell environment for robots, and incorporation of this environment into a new approach for provably fault tolerant robotic systems. The operating system shell is designed to protect the robot from the effects of errors in the lower level manipulator system and the higher level plan. This shell is composed of a number of fault tolerance tasks at a discrete decision making level. These tasks will be identified and outlined for a three link planar robot during the year of exploratory work. The robot will be enhanced with two sensors per joint and will be kinematically redundant for positioning tasks in the plane. This level of hardware redundancy will provide fault tolerance capabilities to the robot. A formal model will be developed for this simple example robot and used to demonstrate the potential benefits of the research approach. This work will provide formal methods to verify fault tolerance for lower and higher level subsystems of a robot system. The key overall goal is to combine diverse techniques for robotic fault tolerance into a provably correct methodology. The development of formal tools for the approach will be important in proving rigorous results about robot fault tolerance. In the one year of the SGER project, a series of fundamental examples will demonstrate how the above approach can significantly impact this emerging research area.
