Prognostics CoE Publications

It is an inescapable truth that no matter how well a system is designed it will degrade, and if degrading parts are not re- paired or replaced the system will fail. Avoiding the expense and safety risks associated with system failures is certainly a top priority in many systems; however, there is also a strong motivation not to be overly cautious in the design and mainte- nance of systems, due to the expense of maintenance and the undesirable sacrifices in performance and cost effectiveness incurred when systems are over designed for safety. This pa- per describes an analytical process that starts with the deriva- tion of an expression to evaluate the desirability of future con- trol outcomes, and eventually produces control routines that use uncertain prognostic information to optimize derived risk metrics. A case study on the design of fault-adaptive control for a skid-steered robot will illustrate some of the fundamen- tal challenges of prognostics-based control design.