CMU RI Thesis Proposal Oct. 16th 2007:Estimating Mission Reliability for Mobile Robots

Title: Estimating Mission Reliability for Mobile Robots

Speaker: Stephen Stancliff

Abstract:
Current mobile robots generally fall into one of two categories as far as reliability is concerned - highly unreliable, or very expensive. Most fall into the first category, requiring teams of graduate students or staff engineers to coddle them in the days and hours before a brief demonstration. The few robots that exhibit very high reliability, such as those used by NASA for planetary exploration, are very expensive.
In order for mobile robots to become more widely used in real-world environments, they will need to have reliability in between these two extremes. In order to design mobile robots with respect to reliability, we need quantitative models for predicting robot reliability and for relating reliability to other design parameters. To date, however, there has been very little formal discussion of reliability in the mobile robotics literature, and no general method has been presented for quantitatively predicting the reliability of mobile robots.
This thesis proposal focuses on this problem of predicting reliability for mobile robots and for using reliability as a quantitative input into mobile robot mission design.

Link:http://www.ri.cmu.edu/events/oral.2007.20.html
Proposal Link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~stancliff/proposal/proposal.pdf