Reflection and Reasoning Mechanisms for Failure Detection and Recovery in a Distributed Robotic Architecture for Complex Robots

Complex robots that interact naturally with humans require the integration, coordination and maintenance of many diverse software components and algorithms. An architecture that incorporates explicit knowledge about the relationships among these components and the overall system state can be used for introspection and consequently to reason about the best configurations of the computing environment under changing conditions; potential uses include maintaining the system's integrity, promoting its health, and providing the ability to dynamically reconfigure system components (e.g., after component failure). In this paper, we describe a rudimentary reasoning system, part of our distributed integrated affect reflection cognition (DIARC) architecture for human-robot interaction, that can autonomously perform failure detection, failure recovery, and system reconfiguration of distributed architectural components to ensure sustained operation and interactions. We demonstrate the functionality and utility of the proposed mechanisms on a robot, where architectural components are forcefully removed by hand and automatically recovered by the system while the robot is continuing its interactions with humans as part of a joint human-robot task.