Robot System providing Fault-Tolerant Services: Research of Middleware supporting Fault-Tolerance

Abstract

Recently, robot technology is actively going on progress to the field of various services such as medical care, entertainment. These service robots are in use for home management nearby person, and so need to operate safely. Fault tolerance is a performable capacity without influence of fault although fault is occurred hardware or software and guarantees safe operation of systems. This paper proposes a robot system providing fault-tolerant services in distributed environment. The systems are developed to apply to robot middleware for supporting fault-tolerance. The robot middleware is divided into three layers of a Service Layer (SL), Network Adaptation Layer (NAL), Network Interface Layer (NIL) and includes Operating System Abstraction Layer (OSAL), Fault-Tolerant Manager (FTM). Especially, Service-Adaptive Engine (SAE) in SL and Fault-Tolerant Manager provides fault tolerance for this middleware and are easy to dynamic expansion. Also, these systems are component-based structure, and so provide reusability, lightweight to load various robot systems.