Aug. 22, 2022 -- A new project entitled "Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Operation of Redundant Robotic Arms", was awarded recently by NSF. Dr. Biyun Xie and Dr. JiangBiao He, both from UK ECE, will serve as the PI and Co-PI, respectively, to lead this 3-year project.
Hazardous environments with extreme temperature, humidity, radiation, etc. escalate the potential risk of hardware failures of robot joint motors and drives. Unfortunately, in unstructured, remote and dangerous environments, such as space exploration, nuclear waste remediation, and disaster rescue, not only are failures more likely to occur, but also it is impossible to perform routine maintenance for these robots after a failure occurs. Besides the above situations, failures occurred in safety-critical robotic applications, could also lead to serious consequences or accidents. Therefore, this project will develop autonomous fault-tolerant and fail-active strategies for redundant robot arms based on predicted and identified joint faults, which will dramatically improve the reliability and robustness of redundant robot arms.
