Towards remote fault detection by analyzing communication priorities

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

The ability to detect faults is an important safety feature for event-based multi-agent systems. In most existing algorithms, each agent tries to detect faults by checking its own behavior. But what if one agent becomes unable to recognize misbehavior, for example due to failure in its onboard fault detection? To improve resilience and avoid propagation of individual errors to the multi-agent system, agents should check each other remotely for malfunction or misbehavior. In this paper, we build upon a recently proposed predictive triggering architecture that involves communication priorities shared throughout the network to manage limited bandwidth. We propose a fault detection method that uses these priorities to detect errors in other agents. The resulting algorithms is not only able to detect faults, but can also run on a low-power microcontroller in real-time, as we demonstrate in hardware experiments.

Authors 3

1. Alexander Gräfe
2. Dominik Baumann

   Uppsala University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Information Technology , Uppsala University , Sweden

3. Sebastian Trimpe Aachen Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering , RWTH Aachen University , 52068 Aachen , Germany