Few common failure cases in mobile robots

TL;DR

This paper discusses common failure scenarios in mobile robots used for critical missions, highlighting real-world examples and offering design considerations to mitigate such failures, especially in hazardous environments.

Contribution

It provides a collection of real failure cases in mobile robots and offers generic strategies to prevent or recover from these failures.

Findings

Identification of common failure cases from real experiences

Suggestions for design and usage considerations to reduce failures

Enhanced understanding of failure recovery in hazardous environments

Abstract

A mobile robot deployed for remote inspection, surveying or rescue missions can fail due to various possibilities and can be hardware or software related. These failure scenarios necessitate manual recovery (self-rescue) of the robot from the environment. It would bring unforeseen challenges to recover the mobile robot if the environment where it was deployed had hazardous or harmful conditions (e.g. ionizing radiations). While it is not fully possible to predict all the failures in the robot, failures can be reduced by employing certain design/usage considerations. Few example failure cases based on real experiences are presented in this short article along with generic suggestions on overcoming the illustrated failure situations.