Robot Vitals and Robot Health: Towards Systematically Quantifying Runtime Performance Degradation in Robots Under Adverse Conditions

This letter addresses the problem of automatically detecting and quantifying performance degradation in remote mobile robots, in real-time, during task execution. A robot may encounter a variety of uncertainties and adversities during task execution, which can impair its ability to carry out tasks effectively and cause its performance to degrade. Such situations can be mitigated or averted by timely detection and intervention, e.g., by a remote human supervisor taking over control in teleoperation mode. Inspired by patient triaging systems in hospitals, we introduce the framework of “robot vitals” for estimating overall “robot health”. A robot's vitals are a set of lower-level metrics that estimate a variety of indicators of performance degradation faced by a robot at any given point in time. Robot health is a higher-level metric that combines robot vitals into a single scalar value estimate of performance degradation. Experiments, both in simulation and on a real mobile robot, demonstrate that the proposed robot vitals and robot health can be used effectively for online estimation of robot performance degradation during run-time.