This thesis proposes a theory for robotic systems that can be fully
self-maintaining. The presented design principles focus on functional survival of
the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance.
Self-maintaining semi-autonomous mobile robots are in great demand in nuclear
disposal sites from where their removal for maintenance is undesirable due to
their radioactive contamination. Similar are requirements for robots in various
defence tasks or space missions. For optimal design, modular solutions are
balanced against capabilities to replace smaller components in a robot by itself or
by help from another robot. Modules are proposed for the basic platform, which
enable self-maintenance within a team of robots helping each other. The primary
method of self-maintenance is replacement of malfunctioning modules or
components by the robots themselves. Replacement necessitates a robot team’s
ability to diagnose and replace malfunctioning modules as needed. Due to their
design, these robots still remain manually re-configurable if opportunity arises for
human intervention. A system reliability model is developed to
describe the new theory. Depending on the system reliability model,
the redundancy allocation problem is presented and solved by a multi objective
algorithm.
Finally, the thesis introduces the self-maintaining process and transfers it to a multi robot task allocation problem with a solution by genetic algorithm
