Optimal maintenance strategy in fault-tolerant multi-robot systems

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of maintenance in fault-tolerant multi-robot systems. Such a system is enabled to work as long as one robot works; namely, completely parallel. For this system, it is required to ensure fault tolerance and maintain high performance taking robot failures and maintenance, such as prevention and correction of robots, into account. Therefore, we propose an optimal maintenance strategy on the basis of reliability engineering. This strategy enables robots to undergo preventive maintenance at optimal intervals and corrective maintenance each time they fail. Through simulation experiments, the effectiveness of the optimal maintenance strategy is investigated. In addition, the influence of robots undergoing maintenance on system performance is mathematically and experimentally discussed on the basis of the number of robots and maintenance strategies.