A Buy-Time Fault Tolerant Method in Distributed Multi-robot Systems

Author(s):  
Peijiang Yuan ◽  
Tianmiao Wang ◽  
Yong Tao
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Kegeleirs ◽  
Giorgio Grisetti ◽  
Mauro Birattari

A robot swarm is a decentralized system characterized by locality of sensing and communication, self-organization, and redundancy. These characteristics allow robot swarms to achieve scalability, flexibility and fault tolerance, properties that are especially valuable in the context of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), specifically in unknown environments that evolve over time. So far, research in SLAM has mainly focused on single- and centralized multi-robot systems—i.e., non-swarm systems. While these systems can produce accurate maps, they are typically not scalable, cannot easily adapt to unexpected changes in the environment, and are prone to failure in hostile environments. Swarm SLAM is a promising approach to SLAM as it could leverage the decentralized nature of a robot swarm and achieve scalable, flexible and fault-tolerant exploration and mapping. However, at the moment of writing, swarm SLAM is a rather novel idea and the field lacks definitions, frameworks, and results. In this work, we present the concept of swarm SLAM and its constraints, both from a technical and an economical point of view. In particular, we highlight the main challenges of swarm SLAM for gathering, sharing, and retrieving information. We also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this approach against traditional multi-robot SLAM. We believe that swarm SLAM will be particularly useful to produce abstract maps such as topological or simple semantic maps and to operate under time or cost constraints.


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 6642-6647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Arrichiello ◽  
Alessandro Marino ◽  
Francesco Pierri

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satoshi Hoshino ◽  
◽  
Hiroya Seki ◽  
Yuji Naka ◽  
Jun Ota ◽  
...  

In automated robotic systems, a robot undergoing corrective maintenance (i.e., repair) or preventive maintenance (i.e., inspection) may become a disturbance of operations for other working robots. Therefore, maintenance of a robot has to be performed adequately. Multi-robot systems have the capability for the substitution and complement of such a robot. To introduce the multi-robot technology in industrial applications, we propose fault-tolerant multi-robot operational strategies for a material transport system focusing on the robot behavior. Working robots, while switching between normal and fault-tolerant operational strategies reactively according to the presence or absence of a robot undergoing maintenance, accomplish tasks. Through simulation experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed strategies is discussed. In addition, an integrated strategy for some failure rates of the robot is investigated. Finally, a maintenance activity for the robots is modeled on the basis of reliability engineering and the reasonability of preventive and corrective maintenance is discussed.


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