Fault diagnosis and system status monitoring for a six-legged walking robot

Rough, unstructured and hazardous areas are typical application scenarios for autonomous mobile robots. In the case of an error or fault, these robots cannot rely on a human to recover or repair them. Therefore, intelligent fault detection systems have to be developed that can autonomously detect faults and create a system status corresponding to the operability of the robot. After a fault has been detected, it might be possible to adapt the robot and still continue with its primary task. This paper presents a fault diagnosis and status monitoring system for a six-legged walking robot. Our developed system is based on expert knowledge and was implemented on the six-legged robot LAURON. It is able to detect seven different types of faults and errors, ranging from mechanical coupling problems to the total loss of leg controller units. The status monitoring part gives the operator a detailed, but still understandable status report about the most important components and their functionality.