Decentralized fault-tolerant control of multi-mobile robot system addressing LiDAR sensor faults

Abstract The control of multi-robot formations is a crucial aspect in various applications, such as transport, surveillance and monitoring environments. Maintaining robots in a specific formation pose or performing a cooperative task is a significant challenge when a fault occurs among any of the ro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific Reports
Main Authors: Ahmed M. Elsayed, Mohamed Elshalakani, Sherif A. Hammad, Shady A. Maged
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2024-10-01
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-75500-3
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Summary:Abstract The control of multi-robot formations is a crucial aspect in various applications, such as transport, surveillance and monitoring environments. Maintaining robots in a specific formation pose or performing a cooperative task is a significant challenge when a fault occurs among any of the robots. This work presents a Decentralized Fault-Tolerant Control (DFTC) scheme that addresses lidar sensor faults within a system of multiple differential wheeled mobile robots. The robots change the formation shape according to the number of available robots within the formation. A Graph theory is implemented to represent the multi-robot formation and communication. Each mobile robot is equipped with three sensors: a wheel encoder, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and a lidar sensor. Sensor fault detection and isolation (FDI) is implemented at two levels. The pose estimation obtained from the wheel encoder and IMU is fused using an extended Kalman filter (EKF), and this pose estimation is utilized at the local level of lidar sensor FDI. At the system level, the FDI of the lidar sensor involves computing a residual by comparing the pose estimation with other lidar sensors mounted on other mobile robots within the formation. The presented FTC scheme is simulated in Simulink multi-robot environments.
ISSN:2045-2322