Active fault tolerance is essential for robot swarms to retain long-term autonomy. Previous work on swarm fault tolerance focuses on reacting to electro-mechanical faults that are spontaneously injected into robot sensors and actuators. Resolving faults once they have manifested as failures is an inefficient approach, and there are some safety-critical scenarios in which any kind of robot failure is unacceptable. We propose a predictive approach to fault tolerance, based on the principle of preemptive maintenance, in which potential faults are autonomously detected and resolved before they manifest as failures. Our approach is shown to improve swarm performance and prevent robot failure in the cases tested.

翻译：主动容错对于机器人集群维持长期自主性至关重要。此前关于集群容错的研究主要集中于对机器人传感器和执行器中自发注入的机电故障进行响应。在故障已显现为失效后再进行解决是一种低效的方法，且在某些安全关键场景中，任何形式的机器人失效都是不可接受的。我们提出一种基于预防性维护原则的预测性容错方法，该方法可在潜在故障显现为失效之前自主检测并解决故障。实验表明，我们的方法能够提高集群性能并防止测试案例中的机器人失效。