Automatic Synthesis of Fault Detection Modules for Mobile Robots

In this paper, we present a new approach for automatic synthesis of fault detection modules for autonomous mobile robots. The method relies on the fact that hardware faults typically change the flow of sensory perceptions received by the robot and the subsequent behavior of the control program. We collect data from three experiments with real robots. In each experiment, we record all sensory inputs from the robots while they are operating normally and after software-simulated faults have been injected. We use back- propagation neural networks to synthesize task-dependent fault detection modules. The performance of the modules is evaluated in terms of false positives and latency.