Fault Diagnosis of Mobile Robot System

In this research, we proposed a fault diagnosis system to deal with the occasion on that the mobile robot, which is being under a certain transporting task, can not work as it was commanded. The proposed diagnosis system can indicate the present fault cause to a certain range based upon the visual and touching sensors equipped on the mobile robot. And moreover, by using the active moving ability of the robot itself, the fault diagnosis system is expected to get the better diagnosing performance with high precision reasoning method. In general working machine system, each sensor parameter that represents a respective working part has a static normal value in the normal working state. Therefore it is simple to depict the abnormal phenomena by detecting that whether the present sensory data deviate from the standard value or not. In the mobile robot system, however, the robot is moving on the wide and uncertain area-no exact track can be known in advance, and during the moving process the sensory data indicating the encountered obstacles is varying with the working environment around. Therefore there will be no static level (normal range) of the sensory data, which can indicate whether the robot is working in a normal state or not. For solving the problems, we here proposed an idea named “run test”: During the fault diagnosing stage, besides the ordinary external sensory data, the diagnosis system sends a certain sequence of running commands to the robot. Thereby we can obtain the useful information, which can supply the clue into further reasoning for the present fault cause, according to analysis of different results of executing those commands. Fig.1 and Fig.2 show us the schematic view and processing flow of the fault diagnosis system and the overview of the experiment site respectively.

Keyword: Mobile Robot, Fault Diagnosis, Reasoning

References

[1] Tao YAN etc, “Fault Diagnosis on Mobile Robot”, JSPE, Robomec’99, June 1999.

SG: a Silicon Graphics workstation

Fig.1 Schematic view of system Fig.2 Full view of the expeiment site