A safety failover subsystem for intelligent mobile robots

This paper proposes a new type of fault tolerance scheme for intelligent mobile robots. In the future, various tasks ranging from daily chores to safety-related tasks will be carried out by individual humanoid robots. If the importance of the tasks is different, the required fault-tolerant capabilities of the robots will also vary accordingly. Therefore, in mobile robots operating under power constraints, fault tolerance that dynamically changes based on the importance of the tasks is desirable because fault-tolerant designs involving hardware redundancy are power intensive. The duplex computer system presented in this paper switches between hot standby and cold standby according to each individual task, and it is characterized by performing safety failover when the standby computer unit is in a cold standby state. This paper describes the safety failover subsystem and its hardware implementation.