The Smart Systems Group have continued their work in creating a Symbiotic System of Systems Approach (SSOSA) for robotics and autonomous systems. A challenge exists for robotics when these systems are deployed in known or unknown areas around humans, other robots and infrastructure. The Smart Systems Group seek to address these Resilience and Reliability challenges which exist under the following areas : Mission Profile, Safety, Environment and Robot.

What is resilience?
Resilience – An ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. From the perspective of robustness, safety compliance and reliability: resilience means you can survive and still operate key systems irrespective of environmental adversity.

How does resilience relate to robotics?
To prevent loss of assets, minimise costs and ensure recovery from high impact/low frequency events. The costly and unforeseen events that induce hardware or software failures (survivability), reduce duration of inspection and maintenance. This can be achieved via increased interaction across multi-robots and system of systems.

Why is a symbiotic system important?
Symbiotic systems allow us to understand and positively contribute to the health of the asset system. It builds on safety, resilience and reliability in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) situations, where human deployment is problematic and hazardous.

Presented currently is a digital twin to view data collected from a multi-robot fleet. In this example, it is possible to view a Clearpath Husky, DJI Tello Drone, Boston Dynamics SPOT and 3x security cameras.

The final autonomous mission evaluation, taking place in March 2022, will consist of a Clearpath Husky A200 with dual UR5 manipulators, Boston Dynamics SPOT with robot arm, DJI Tello Drone, several security cameras and other infrastructural sensors.

To find out more see links to the teams most recent publications on Cyber Physical Systems: