Reliability improvement of robotics systems: Analysis, design and real time supervision

Reliability improvement of Robotics Systems is a key issue in automation and autonomy in maintenance and intervention tasks in Hostile Environment. Constraints in hostile environment require different way of using and programming of robots when compared with industrial application. To take maximum benefit of robot technology, the level of Confidence in the robotics tool must be much higher than in classical production world. To increase this level of confidence, application of Reliability Engineering in combination with strong knowledge of robot technology leads to such an objective. In this paper, three different aspects are considered and developed as tools to be used in different stage of this improvement. The first one is the Analysis of reliability of robotics and in remote handling systems in general to identify failure modes, effects on the system, sensitive components and needs of redundancy. Tools as the Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis are presented as well as the Fault Tree Analysis. The second one deals with design criteria for new robot systems or improvement of existing one using reliability and safety driven design concepts. Such concepts are applicable on mechanical design, electrical design and electronic design including the computer controller of the robot. The last aspect is the control in real time of availability of functions, safety level as well as failure detection in the various subsystems composing a robot device. Techniques of supervision by use of safety check subroutines are considered. Experiences of such improvement process of robotics for maintenance of Fusion machines is discussed. (author). Figs