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RELIABILITY, SAFETY, 4

AND COMPLIANCE

Reliability

Why bother with this topic at all? Well, given the most recent TV shows about battling
robots, most people think of robots as mechanical disasters that can only last three min-
utes before various parts start to fall off (or get yanked off). Whole organizations are
devoted to such events, such as the Survival Research Labs (www.srl.org/). On the more
serious side, robots working in automotive plants are expected to work nonstop for years
in very difficult conditions.
To the greatest extent possible, it makes sense to design a robot to be highly reliable.
Towards that end, we must learn what reliability is, how to measure it, how to predict
it, and how to achieve it. Certainly, many ways are available for accomplishing this, both
scientific and seat of the pants. In this chapter, we’ll take a grand tour of both methods.
Reliability has many definitions; here’s mine. For the robot to be reliable, it must ful-
fill all of our expectations. Certainly, the tires cannot fall off. But more to the point, it

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