An active approach to fault tolerance is essential for robot swarms to achieve long-term autonomy. Previous efforts have focused on responding to spontaneous electro-mechanical faults and failures. However, many faults occur gradually over time. Waiting until such faults have manifested as failures before addressing them is both inefficient and unsustainable in a variety of scenarios. This work argues that the principles of predictive maintenance, in which potential faults are resolved before they hinder the operation of the swarm, offer a promising means of achieving long-term fault tolerance. This is a novel approach to swarm fault tolerance, which is shown to give a comparable or improved performance when tested against a reactive approach in almost all cases tested.

翻译：主动式故障容忍方法对于实现机器人群体的长期自主性至关重要。先前的研究主要集中于应对突发的机电故障与失效。然而，许多故障是随时间逐渐形成的。在多种应用场景中，等待此类故障显现为失效后再进行处理，不仅效率低下且难以持续。本研究提出，预测性维护原则——即在潜在故障影响群体运行前予以解决——为实现长期故障容忍提供了一种前景广阔的方法。这是一种新颖的群体容错方法，在几乎所有测试案例中，与被动响应方法相比均展现出相当或更优的性能表现。