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Reliability of Mobile Robot Teams
Head: John Dolan
Contact: John Dolan (jmd@cs.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Associated center: VASC

For more information, see this project's homepage.

We are developing analytical tools which enable the prediction of robotic mission failure given mission specifications and robot component reliability data. These tools will enable a mission designer to choose the lowest-cost configuration of robot components and robot teams providing a required probability of mission success. We are specifically addressing multirobot missions for Mars, but the tools we are developing should have relevance for many robotic applications.

Within some narrow range of missions we envision the end product of this work to be analytical methods embedded within software which accepts as input mission parameters (including the tasks to be completed, the mission duration, and the required probability of success) and component parameters (including reliability and cost) and gives as output a comparison of different robot and team configurations in terms of their cost and their probability of success.

More generally, we will lay out the methods which can be used to develop such tools for a broad range of robotic missions.

In addition, we hope that we will be able to make some general statements about classes of missions and classes of robot team configurations. For instance, we hope to discover general guidelines for when it is preferable to have a team of robots vs. a single robot.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• [Home] John Dolan - Senior Systems Scientist <jmd@cs.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Stephen B Stancliff - Research Programmer <stancliff@cmu.edu>

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Planning to Fail - Reliability as a Design Parameter for Planetary Rover Missions
  S.B. Stancliff, J. Dolan, and A. Trebi-Ollennu
  Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Measuring Performance and Intelligence of Intelligent Systems (PerMIS '07), August, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [61 KB] copyrighted

• Mission Reliability Estimation for Multirobot Team Design
  S.B. Stancliff, J. Dolan, and A. Trebi-Ollennu
  Proc. 2006 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2006, pp. 2206 - 2211. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [218 KB] copyrighted

• Mission Reliability Estimation for Repairable Robot Teams
  S.B. Stancliff, J. Dolan, and A. Trebi-Ollenu
  International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, Vol. 3, No. 2, June, 2006, pp. 155 - 164. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [456 KB] copyrighted

• Mission Reliability Estimation for Repairable Robot Teams
  S.B. Stancliff, J. Dolan, and A. Trebi-Ollennu
  Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multi-Agent Robotic Systems - MARS 2005, INSTICC, Portugal, September, 2005, pp. 144 - 151. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [162 KB] copyrighted

• Planning to Fail: Mission Design for Modular Repairable Robot Teams
  S.B. Stancliff, J. Dolan, and A. Trebi-Ollennu
  Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space (ISAIRAS 2005), ESA Publications Division, September, 2005. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [289 KB] copyrighted

• Towards a Predictive Model of Mobile Robot Reliability
  S.B. Stancliff, J. Dolan, and A. Trebi-Ollennu
  tech. report CMU-RI-TR-05-38, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, August, 2005. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [346 KB] copyrighted