Availability Analysis of Robotic Swarm Systems

Availability analysis is an important issue in robotic swarm systems. It can help the designer to construct a cost-effective system with high availability and fewer resources. For the model and analysis to be fully specified and practical, this paper systematically investigates the major issues that need to be addressed in the analysis of various robotic swarm applications. Four models are established to consider systems with dependent and independent robots, homogenous and non-homogenous systems, and the effect of various types of motions on the overall system failure pattern. Detailed analysis of each of these models is performed based on renewal theory and continuous Markov Chain techniques. Numerical availability evaluations for two applications are also presented.