To err is robotic, to tolerate immunological: fault detection in multirobot systems

Fault detection and fault tolerance represent two of the most important and largely unsolved issues in the field of multirobot systems (MRS). Efficient, long-term operation requires an accurate, timely detection, and accommodation of abnormally behaving robots. Most existing approaches to fault-tolerance prescribe a characterization of normal robot behaviours, and train a model to recognize these behaviours. Behaviours unrecognized by the model are consequently labelled abnormal or faulty. MRS employing these models do not transition well to scenarios involving temporal variations in behaviour (e.g., online learning of new behaviours, or in response to environment perturbations). The vertebrate immune system is a complex distributed system capable of learning to tolerate the organism's tissues even when they change during puberty or metamorphosis, and to mount specific responses to invading pathogens, all without the need of a genetically hardwired characterization of normality. We present a generic abnormality detection approach based on a model of the adaptive immune system, and evaluate the approach in a swarm of robots. Our results reveal the robust detection of abnormal robots simulating common electro-mechanical and software faults, irrespective of temporal changes in swarm behaviour. Abnormality detection is shown to be scalable in terms of the number of robots in the swarm, and in terms of the size of the behaviour classification space.