Building iRIS: A Robotic Immune System

Progress in robotics has led to complex autonomous and even collaborating robotic systems, fulfilling mission critical tasks in safety critical environments. An increase in capabilities and thus complexity consequently led to a dramatic increase in possible faults that might manifest in errors. Even worse, by applying robots with emerging behavior in non-deterministic real-world environments, faults may be introduced from external sources. Consequently, fault testing has become increasingly difficult. Both, software and hardware may fail or even break, and hence may cause a mission failure, heavy damage, or even severe injuries and loss of life. The ability of a robotic system to function in presence of such faults, so to become fault tolerant, is a continuously growing area of research. Our work meets this challenge by developing a mechanism for robotic systems that is capable of detecting defects, selecting feasible counter measures, and hence keeping robots in a sane and and consequently safe state. Inspired by biology, we conceptually aim at an immune system for a robot (RIS), which is able to detect anomalies, and which is able to autonomously counter them by appropriate means. This position paper outlines the requirements and research scopes that have been identified as relevant for the development of a robotic immune system.