Fault detection and isolation system design for omnidirectional soccer-playing robots

A mobile robot has been constructed for entry in the Latinamerican RoboCup robot soccer contests. To improve the robot's robustness and availability, fault detection and isolation functions are required for major faults causing battery voltage drops or motor encoder decoupling. This article presents the design for such an FDI system. The omnidirectional robot and its models are described, and four FDI systems are developed, based on extended Kalman and particle filters. A comparison of the systems using simulation found that the FDI incorporating a modified version of the Rao-Blackwellised particle filter exhibits a better performance for battery faults.