AUTHOR=O'Keeffe James , Tarapore Danesh , Millard Alan G. , Timmis Jon TITLE=Adaptive Online Fault Diagnosis in Autonomous Robot Swarms JOURNAL=Frontiers in Robotics and AI VOLUME=5 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.00131 DOI=10.3389/frobt.2018.00131 ISSN=2296-9144 ABSTRACT=

Previous work has shown that robot swarms are not always tolerant to the failure of individual robots, particularly those that have only partially failed and continue to contribute to collective behaviors. A case has been made for an active approach to fault tolerance in swarm robotic systems, whereby the swarm can identify and resolve faults that occur during operation. Existing approaches to active fault tolerance in swarms have so far omitted fault diagnosis, however we propose that diagnosis is a feature of active fault tolerance that is necessary if swarms are to obtain long-term autonomy. This paper presents a novel method for fault diagnosis that attempts to imitate some of the observed functions of natural immune system. The results of our simulated experiments show that our system is flexible, scalable, and improves swarm tolerance to various electro-mechanical faults in the cases examined.