Failure Recovery Planning for an Arm Mounted on an Exploratory Rover

In this paper, we present a strategy for recovery from joint failures in a robot arm mounted on a mobile platform. We use the ability to reposition the base of the arm by relocating the platform and to change the position of the wrist by regrasping the scientific-tool package to provide design degrees of freedom (DOFs). The velocity and acceleration specifications of the task combine with the constraints imposed by the joint failure to yield values for these DOFs that ensure that the task can be achieved despite the joint failure.