Fault-Tolerant Mobile Robots

International audienceThis chapter surveys crash tolerance, self-stabilization, Byzantine fault-tolereance, and resilience to inaccuracies for the main building blocks in mobile robots networks: gathering, convergence, scattering, leader election, and flocking

Software Systems Facilitating Self-Adaptive Control Software

Self-adaptive control software is a new paradigm to create robust, fault-tolerant mobile robots. This type of software analyzes its performance and dynamically modifies itself to operate better in adverse and rapidly changing conditions. We have created two systems that facilitate the creation of self-adaptive control software: PB3A and RAVE. PB3A, the Port-Based Adaptable Agent Architecture, is a mobile, agent-based framework that allows software to adapt itself at all levels. RAVE, the Real And Virtual Environment, is a mixed-reality simulation environment for mobile robots. Together, these two systems allow for the creation, testing, and analysis of self-adaptive control software by on- and off-line simulation. In this paper, we give brief overviews of PB3A and RAVE and present applications that demonstrate robotic systems using selfadaptive control software