A multiple particle filters method for fault diagnosis of mobile robot dead-reckoning system

Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) is increasingly important for wheeled mobile robots (WMRs). One of the most promising approaches is the so-called particle filter (also known as sequential Monte Carlo) method. In this paper, rule based inference and multiple particle filters are integrated to diagnose hard faults of WMR´s dead reckoning system. The rule based inference method is employed to determine the states of the movement of the robot in plane and each state of movement is monitored with a particle filter. This approach presents a general framework to combine domain knowledge with particle filters. The key advantage of the proposed method is that it decreases the size of the state space for each particle filter. As a result, it decreases particle number and increases efficiency and accuracy for each particle filter. Experiment performed on a mobile robot shows the improvement in accuracy and efficiency.