Towards remote fault detection by analyzing communication priorities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel remote fault detection method for multi-agent systems that leverages communication priorities to identify errors, enhancing resilience and enabling real-time operation on low-power hardware.

Contribution

It proposes a new fault detection approach using communication priorities within a predictive triggering framework, improving fault detection and system robustness.

Findings

Effective fault detection using communication priorities

Real-time implementation on low-power microcontrollers

Hardware experiments demonstrating practical viability

Abstract

The ability to detect faults is an important safety feature for event-based multi-agent systems. In most existing algorithms, each agent tries to detect faults by checking its own behavior. But what if one agent becomes unable to recognize misbehavior, for example due to failure in its onboard fault detection? To improve resilience and avoid propagation of individual errors to the multi-agent system, agents should check each other remotely for malfunction or misbehavior. In this paper, we build upon a recently proposed predictive triggering architecture that involves communication priorities shared throughout the network to manage limited bandwidth. We propose a fault detection method that uses these priorities to detect errors in other agents. The resulting algorithms is not only able to detect faults, but can also run on a low-power microcontroller in real-time, as we demonstrate in hardware experiments.