Fault Diagnosis and Fault Tolerant Control for Wheeled Mobile Robots under Unknown Environments: A Survey

Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) and fault tolerant control (FTC) are increasingly important for wheeled mobile robots (WMRs), especially those in unknown environments such as planetary exploration. Due to the importance of reliability and safe operation of WMRs, this paper presents a survey of state-of-the-art in FDD & FTC of WMRs under unknown environments. Firstly, we briefly introduce main components, typical kinematics models and fault models of WMRs and error models of inertial navigation sensors. Secondly, we discuss main approaches for FDD/FTC of WMRs, including multiple model based approach, particle filter based approach, sensor fusion based approach, layered fault tolerant architecture and so on. At last, the main challenges, difficulties and some future trends for the field are offered.