The Evaluation Platform for Testing Fault-Tolerance Methodologies in Electro-Mechanical Applications

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a new platform for estimating the fault-tolerance quality of electro-mechanical applications based on FPGAs. We demonstrate one working example of such EM application that was evaluated using our platform: the mechanical robot and its electronic controller in an FPGA. Different building blocks of the electronic robot controller allow to model different effects of faults on the whole mission of the robot (searching a path in a maze). In the experiments, the mechanical robot is simulated in the 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 the performance. Further extensions of the platform focus on the interconnection of the platform with the functional verification environment working directly in FPGA that allows automation and speed-up of checking the correctness of the system after the injection of faults.

Zero-maintenance of electronic systems: Perspectives, challenges, and opportunities

“…Radationhardened FGPAs have been developed but functional resilience capabilities have also been introduced for fault tolerance. The potential impact of fault-tolerance within FPGAs has been considered at the electromechanical system level of a robot [143]. Specific examples discussed earlier in Section IV included bitstream EDC, managed partial reconfiguration and runtime manipulation of the configuration, each of which may be exploited in mission critical applications and online [144].…”