Diagnosis and repair of dependent failures in the control system of a mobile autonomous robot

Detecting, locating and repairing faults is a hard task. This holds especially in cases where dependent failures occur in practice. In this paper we present a methodology which is capable of handling dependent failures. For this purpose we extend the model-based diagnosis approach by explicitely representing knowledge about such dependencies which are stored in a failure dependency graph. Beside the theoretical foundations we present algorithms for computing diagnoses and repair actions that are based on these extensions. Moreover, we introduce a case study which makes use of a larger control program of an autonomous and mobile robot. The case study shows that the proposed approach can be effectively used in practice.