A Model-Based Expert System for the Diagnosis of Faults in a Robot System for Cleaning Castings

This contribution presents an Expert System which has been developed within a joint project of the University of Karlsruhe and the Nuclear Research Center Karlsruhe.The long term goal of this cooperation is to develop a generic tool for the diagnosis of faults of technical systems. In order to make such a tool generic enough to be easily adaptable to new applications, a deep-reasoning approach has been developed. A prototype of the system has been implemented using the Knowledge Craft (TM) environment The prototype has been tested with industrial robots of UNIMATION, Inc. and is currently being applied to the much more complex COMETOS system for the cleaning of large castings consisting of several robots, end—effectors, sensors and different controllers. Both applications are described.