Fault detection approach for a 4 - wheel skid steering mobile robot

In this paper we develop and we propose a method to detect faults in a four wheel skid steering mobile robot (SSMR). The basic idea behind the method is to use odometry in order to estimate robot parameters. For this purpose we develop kinematic model of the mobile robot that can be used to estimate odometry parameters. These parameters are the radius of right and left wheels R_R and R_L respectively. Faults are detected using residuals generated from differences between sensors measurements and estimated values. The advantage of the proposed method is that does not need additional sensors and only position encoders are used. Pioneer 3-AT was used as a robotic platform.