Development of a remote fault diagnosis system applicable to autonomous mobile robots

In this paper, the novel idea of using an autonomous mobile robot as a virtual local network is proposed as a system for the remote diagnosis of faults of a mobile robot. There are two primary points in this research. First, an objective of the research is to achieve a system with good expandability, i.e. one in which the diagnosis can be achieved whether there are many or few mobile robots to be diagnosed. To accomplish this goal by simply changing some system settings, a simple network management protocol (SNMP) structure is utilized. Within the developed diagnosis system, a mobile robot is taken as one of the management objects of the network management system (NMS). The SNMP, which is widely used in the NMS, is applied and adapted to the developed system as the communication protocol for exchanging diagnosis information. Moreover, by taking advantage of the active moving and sensing ability of autonomous mobile robots, an effective method of fault inference called a 'run-test' is discussed. By using this method, the accuracy of the diagnoses is improved. In the best-case scenario, the certainty of an accurate diagnosis increased from 20% (without using the 'run-test') to 93%. On the other hand, in some cases, the accuracy of the diagnosis results barely improved. On average, among the cases discussed in this paper, the accuracy of the diagnosis results improved about 2.1 times by the proposed method.