FT-AVS: a Fault-tolerant Architecture for Real-Time Active Vision

The nature of most problems addressed by robotics requires that robotic systems possess real-time properties. Additionally, as a result of steady increases in power and decreases in the cost of technology, it has become feasible to integrate sophisticated vision systems into robotic tasks. This can be seen by the recent interest in active vision.The purpose of this paper is two-fold: we first present a novel architecture for real-time active vision systems, and then enhance the architecture with a unified approach to fault tolerance. Our system is designed modularly in order to enable the flexible addition of hardware and software redundancy and also to allow reconfiguration when and where needed. This gives us the ability to handle faults in the context of active vision. Further, the distribution of software on the available hardware is such that users can utilize a dual-model of execution (simulation and rapid prototyping). Lastly, the tests we ran on the implemented architecture in order to validate the results of the experimentation and simulations show a good correlation of parameters.