An investigation of MML methods for fault diagnosis in mobile robots

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utility of a diagnosis technique, which uses minimum message length (MML) for autonomous mobile robot fault diagnosis. A simulator was developed for a behavior-based robotic system and results were gathered for over 24,000 simulations varying the level of test noise and the components with simulated failures. The results showed that the MML diagnosis technique did not perform well as a turn-key solution. In two different data sets, only 0.59% and 1.19% of the test cases were correctly diagnosed and none of the cases with multiple failures were identified correctly. This paper presents the approach used to evaluate the new technique, the results, and a discussion of why MML diagnosis may not be appropriate for mobile robotics.