A survey of fault diagnosis for swarm systems

Swarm systems have received increasing research attention in recent years and they can be found in many application areas as diverse as unmanned vehicle formation systems, multi-robot systems, sensor networks, etc. Reliability and safety are important issues in swarm systems, which can be improved by the fault diagnosis technology. In this paper, recent development of fault diagnosis algorithms for swarm systems is reviewed. The description of swarm systems is given, followed by characteristics of faults in swarm systems. Specially, faults in swarm systems are classified into topology faults and component faults. Then fault diagnosis algorithms for swarm systems are classified according to their architectures, fault types and approaches, respectively. Finally, several unsolved problems of fault diagnosis algorithms for swarm systems are highlighted.