The use of robotics systems is increasingly widespread and spans a variety of application areas. From healthcare, to manufacturing, to space missions, these systems are typically conceived to perform dangerous or critical tasks. The nature of such tasks (e.g., surgery operations or radioactive waste clean-up) places high demands on the dependability of robotics systems. Fault tree analysis is among the most often used dependability assessment techniques in various domains of robotics. However, fault tree analysis of cost-effective fault tolerant robotics systems requires compositional synthesis of fault trees extended with the expressive power to allow analyzing the sequential dependencies among the components. Thereafter, a relevant experience from the automotive domain is presented. This consists mainly of a suitable synthesis approach that computes expressions of global failure conditions from the dysfunctional behavior local to the components. The benefits of the approach to dependability analysis of robotics architectures are highlighted by using a fault-tolerant example system.
Efficient fault tree analysis of complex fault tolerant multiple-phased systems
