With the midterm elections in the United States winding down, I thought I’d try to tie embedded design concepts to the process of elections. On some of the aerospace projects I worked on, we used voting schemes as fault tolerant techniques. In some cases, because we could not trust the sensors, we used multiple sensors, and performed voting among the sensor controllers (along with separate and independent filtering) to improve the quality of the data that we used for our control algorithms. We might use multiple of the same type of sensor, and in some cases we would use sensors that differed from each other significantly so that they would not be susceptible to the same types of bad readings.
I did a variety of searches on fault tolerance and voting to see if there was any recent material on the topic. There was not a lot of material available, and what was available was scholarly, and I was generally not able to download the files. It is possible I did a poor job choosing my search terms. However, this lack of material made me wonder if people are using the technique at all and/or has it evolved into a different form. In this case, sensor fusion.
Sensor fusion is the practice of combining data derived from sensors from disparate sources to deliver “better” data than would be possible if these sources were used individually. “Better” in this case can mean more accurate, complete, reliable data. From this perspective, the fusion of the data is not strictly a voting scheme, but there are some similarities with the original concept.
This leads me to this week’s question. Are you, or someone you know, using voting or sensor fusion within embedded system designs? As systems continue to increase in complexity, the need for robust design principles that can enable systems to correctly operate with less-than-perfect components becomes more relevant. Is the voting schemes of yesterday still relevant, or have they evolved into something else?
Visit Embedded Insights to see the full conversation occurring across multiple communities about this and other questions of the week.
