An integrated health and contingency management case study on an autonomous ground robot

Autonomous robotic vehicles are playing an increasingly important role in support of a wide variety of present and future critical missions. Due to the absence of timely operator/pilot interaction and potential catastrophic consequence of unattended faults and failures, a real-time, onboard health and contingency management system is desired. This system would be capable of detecting and isolating faults, predicting fault progression and automatically reconfiguring the system to accommodate faults. This paper presents the implementation of an integrated health and contingency management system on an autonomous ground robot. This case study is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and benefit of using real-time prognostics and health management (PHM) information in robot control and mission reconfiguration. Several key software modules including a HyDE-based diagnosis reasoner, particle filtering-based prognosis server and a prognostics-enhanced mission planner are presented in this paper with illustrative experimental results.