Fault-Tolerant Middleware for Service Robots

Recently, robot technology is actively going on progress to the field of various services such as home care, medical care, entertainment, and etc. Because these service robots are in use nearby person, they need to be operated safely even though hardware and software faults occur. This paper proposes a Fault-Tolerant middleware for a robot system, which has following two characteristics: supporting of heterogeneous network interface and processing of software components and network faults. The Fault-Tolerant middleware consists of a Service Layer(SL), a Network Adaptation Layer(NAL), a Network Interface Layer(NIL), a Operating System ion Layer(OSAL), and a Fault-Tolerant Manager(FTM). Especially, the Fault-Tolerant Manager consists of 4 components: Monitor, Fault Detector, Fault Notifier, and Fault Recover to detect and recover the faults effectively. This paper implements and tests the proposed middleware. Some experiment results show that the proposed Fault-Tolerant middleware is working well.