Distributed Fault Detection and Isolation for Cooperative Mobile Manipulators

The paper presents a Distributed Fault Detection and Isolation strategy for a team of mobile manipulators performing a cooperative mission. The overall system relies on an observer-controller scheme where each robot estimates the global state of the team through a distributed observer; then, the global state estimate is used by each robot to compute the estimated local input so as to achieve a specific global task. The observer-controller scheme also allows to define a set of residual vectors that can be used by the robots to detect and isolate faults affecting any member of the team, even if not in direct communication, and without increasing the computational burden and the information exchange. The approach is validated via numerical simulations with a team of four mobile manipulators performing a transportation mission