A Complex Control System for Testing Fault-Tolerance Methodologies

The aim of this paper is to present a new platform for estimating the fault-tolerance quality of electro-mechanical (EM) applications based on FPGAs. We demonstrate one working example of such EM application: the mechanical robot and its electronic controller in an FPGA. Different building blocks of the electronic robot controller design allow to model different effects of faults on the whole mission of the robot (searching a path in a maze). The mechanical robot is simulated in the Player/Stage simulation environment, where the effects of faults injected into its controller can be seen. In this way, it is possible to differentiate between the fault that causes the failure of the system and the fault that only decreases its performance.