干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

While developing the autonomous desert race car "Sandstorm", an entrant in the DARPA Grand Challenge, the Carnegie Mellon University Red Team noted Sandstorm needed the ability to autonomously recover from faults. Due to the project being funded by donations of hardware and limited cash the team had to develop the robotic system in the most frugal manner possible. This frugality resulted in an unmanned ground vehicle with a single string control system. Failure Effects Mode Analysis (FEMA) of the single string system found that by ensuring none of the 8 perception, navigation, and drive by wire computers had interface dependencies which could not sustain temporary loss of communication across external interfaces then most basic fault recovery mechanisms, power cycling and process reinitialization, could be implemented.