Fault tolerant and adaptive path planning in crowded environments for mobile robots based on hazard estimation via health signals

Abstract

Mobile robots are complex systems that tend to become even more complex. Since these systems show often graceful degradation in case of hardware faults the applied control strategies should be taken into account. The overall fitness of a robot can be condensed into health signals. Depending on this signal the control of the robot can be adjusted to counteract reduced sensing or acting capabilities, by following the design principles of organic computing. This work introduces techniques to estimate possible hazards that are introduced by the presence of obstacles in the close proximity of a damaged robot and might threaten its task.