Modular Safety Design of Autonomous Systems Using KURT3D as an Example

Various catastrophes like earthquakes in recent years have proven the absolute need for specialized autonomous agents within the framework of a well-organized structure to manage and overcome the effects of disasters. The identification of disaster victims in such cases is often an extremely difficult task requiring the highest standards of navigation, monitoring and safety methods to best save the human life especially when the catastrophe occurs. Robocup Rescue intends to promote research and development in Disaster Rescue which is one of the most serious social issues which involves very large number of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. This class of cognitive agents must demonstrate the solutions to the challenges involved in search and rescue applications and to provide objective evaluation of robotic implementations in respective environments. KURT3D, an autonomous mobile robot meets these requirements by employing perceptible risk analysis and deploying sophisticated safety and monitoring methods, by achieving an accretive growth in the safety integrity level of the integral system used for safety critical applications.In this thesis, we propose modularity as a more efficient means of constructing safety cases for complex systems and it would be sensible to exploit this area to determine its applicability to safety critical situations, and is used for evaluating the contributions of this thesis. This thesis presents the strategies for the risk assessment to be performed on KURT3D, and to develop and design specific safety methods for the risks posed by the machine in the rescue scenario. Finally, we improve the safety integrity level of the concrete system by developing a fault checking library for the controller which is said to be the crux of the system and thus enhances their suitability for high performance, power-aware, safety critical application. About Fraunhofer AIS The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft undertakes applied research of direct utility to private and public enterprise and of wide benefit to society. It maintains roughly 80 research units, including 58 fraunhofer institutes, at over 40 different locations throughout Germany. The FhG-AIS [33] is a member of the fraunhofer information and communication technology group, which represents the biggest, coordinated capacity in the field of applied research in informatics within Europe. ARC department[5] investigate hybrid robot control architectures that amalgamate reactive components working in close sensormotor coupling, on the one hand, and deliberative components working on an explicit symbol level, on the other hand. Of particular interest are the flow of information from the sensor-motor components to the symbol level, and the way in which the reasoning components modify physical robot action. The goal is to formulate and demonstrate structure and organization principles for robot controllers as well as a controller design methodology that together allow concrete controllers for concrete robot applications to be designed in a principled way. As a piece of software, a robot control system is special in that it must cope with data in many different grades of granularity (sensor readings Vs. user-supplied mission data) and yield purposeful action on different time scales (collision reflexes Vs. optimal longterm mission organization). Accordingly, a robot control program