Real-time fault diagnosis [robot fault diagnosis]

This article presents a number of complementary algorithms for detecting faults on-board operating robots, where a fault is defined as a deviation from expected behavior. The algorithms focus on faults that cannot directly be detected from current sensor values but require inference from a sequence of time-varying sensor values. Each algorithm provides an independent improvement over the basic approach. These improvements are not mutually exclusive, and the algorithms may be combined to suit the application domain. All the approaches presented require dynamic models representing the behavior of each of the fault and operational states. These models can be built from analytical models of the robot dynamics, data from simulation, or from the real robot. All the approaches presented detect faults from a finite number of known fault conditions, although there may potentially be a very large number of these faults.