State-monitoring component-based fault-tolerance techniques for OPRoS framework

The OPRoS (Open Platform for Robotic Services) framework is proposed as an application runtime environment for service robot systems. For the successful deployment of the OPRoS framework, fault tolerance support is crucial on top of its basic functionalities of lifecycle, thread and connection management. In the previous work [1] on OPRoS fault tolerance supports, we presented a framework-based fault tolerance architecture. In this paper, we extend the architecture with component-based fault tolerance techniques, which can provide more simplicity and efficiency than the pure framework-based approach. This argument is especially true for fault detection, since most faults and failure can be defined when the system cannot meet the requirement of the application functions. Specifically, the paper applies two widely-used fault detection techniques to the OPRoS framework: 'bridge component' and 'process model' component techniques for fault detection. The application details and performance of the proposed techniques are demonstrated by the same application scenario in [1]. The combination of component-based techniques with the framework-based architecture would improve the reliability of robot systems using the OPRoS framework.