Design and Implementation of a Fault-Tolerant System for Industrial Robots Under Hostile Operating Conditions

This paper presents the design and implementation of a strategy for protecting trajectory data that will be executed by industrial robots working under hostile operating conditions. Specifically, the Controller Area Network protocol is used to send information about trajectories between two terminals: the controller and the robot. To prevent the adverse effects of corrupt information on robot performance, information is protected through a convolutional code. In this way, the receptor detects and corrects the bits damaged during communication. The communication system designed is validated by assessing the performance of a 3-DoF planar robot that executes default trajectories under hostile operating conditions. The controller response is evaluated under communication disturbances by means of performance indexes and considering two scenarios: with or without the convolutional code designed. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd