Power efficiency estimation based health monitoring and fault detection of modular and reconfigurable robot

Power efficiency degradation of machines often provides intrinsic indication of problems associated with their operation conditions. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, a simple yet effective power efficiency estimation based health monitoring and fault detection technique is proposed for modular and reconfigurable robot with joint torque sensor. Power efficiency coefficients of each joint module are obtained using sensor measurements and used directly for health monitoring and fault detection. The proposed method has been experimentally tested on a modular and reconfigurable robot with joint torque sensing and a distributed control system. Experiment results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.