A New Approach in Mobile Robot Fault Tolerant Control. Minimizing Costs and Extending Functionality

Today’s trends in control engineering and robotics are blending gradually into a slightly challenging area, the development of fault tolerant real-time applications. Hence, applications should timely deliver synchronized data-sets, minimize latency in their response and meet their performance specifications in the presence of disturbances and faults. The fault tolerant behavior in mobile robots refers to the possibility to autonomously detect and identify faults as well as the capability to continue operating after a fault occurred. This paper introduces a real-time distributed control application with fault tolerance capabilities for differential wheeled mobile robots. ARTEMIC combines the power and flexibility of real-time open-source software, the robustness of nonlinear control schemes, the efficiency of Kalman filtering and the extensibility of high-level programming languages for hardware interfacing. Specific design, development and implementation details will be provided in this paper. Key–Words: Mobile Robotics, Fault Tolerant Control, Sliding Mode Control, Extended Kalman Filter, Real Time Linux, Distributed Control, Grafcet