Fault tolerance for modular robots

Modularity and fault tolerance are relatively new areas in robotics. While modularity attempts to select the simplest robot to accomplish a given task fault tolerance leans towards sophisticated designs by building as many redundancies as possible to avoid faults. Hence, these two concepts seem contradictory at first. However, modularity allows selective integration of fault tolerance into robotic modules on an as needed basis. This, in turn, further improves the value of modularity. In this work, the author briefly reviews how fault tolerance requirements influence the modular robot architecture in order to build fault-tolerant robots with the minimum number of additional modules. Specifically, distribution of robotic components among various modules suggests that the development of a fault-tolerant joint module will be most beneficial to enhance fault tolerance capabilities of a robot