The evaluation platform for testing fault-tolerance methodologies in electro-mechanical applications

The aim of this paper is to present a new platform for estimating the fault-tolerance quality of electro-mechanical (EM) systems based on FPGAs. We demonstrate one working example of such an EM system that was evaluated using our platform: the mechanical robot and its electronic controller in an FPGA. Different building blocks of the electronic robot controller allow us to model different effects of faults on the whole mission of the robot (searching a path in a maze). In the experiments, the mechanical robot is simulated in a simulation environment, where the effects of faults artificially injected into its controller can be seen. In this way, it is possible to differentiate between the fault that causes the failure of the system and the fault that only decreases its performance. Further extensions of the platform focus on the interconnection of the platform with the functional verification environment working directly in FPGA that allows for the automation and speed-up for checking the correctness of the system after the injection of faults.