Reliable real‐time robot operation employing intelligent forward recovery

Modern computer‐controlled robots typically fail at their tasks whenever they encounter an error, no matter how minor. The physical environment of a typical assembly robot is too unstructured to benefit from conventional software approaches to reliability. We present an approach which interfaces the real‐time operation of the robot with an intelligent subsystem that performs error analysis and forward recovery if a failure occurs. Our approach involves a special representation of the robot's program that efficiently tracks the robot's operation in real time and is easy to modify to include automatically generated recovery procedures.