Performance Analysis of a Repairable Robot Safety System with Standby, Imperfect Coverage and Reboot Delay

Abstract

The present study deals with a robot safety system composed of standby robot units and inbuilt safety unit. When the main operative unit fails, it is replaced by the standby robot unit available in the system. The concept of reboot delay is also incorporated in this study according to which the robot unit is rebooted if it is not successfully recovered. The recovery and reboot times of failed units, life time of the operative as well as standby units and the repair time are assumed be exponentially distributed. Furthermore, the repair time of partially-failed unit of total system failure is assumed to be arbitrarily distributed. The expressions for the state probabilities, availability, reliability and mean time to failure are derived with the help of Markovian and supplementary variable methods. The occurrence of standby units, imperfect coverage and reboot demonstrates the significant impact on the robot system reliability, availability and mean time to failure. A numerical illustration has been provided to validate the present model as well as to demonstrate the effects of various parameters on the performance measures of the robot safety system.