Reliability and Safety for Mobile Robots in Hostile Environment

There are several cases, where manipulation or inspection tasks have to be performed in dangerous environment. In order to avoid impacts on human health, machines are preferred to be used for those tasks. Very often the environment is characterised by considerable extensions. Thus the machines have to be mobile in order to have a sufficiently wide range of action. However, even machines are not perfectly insensitive to bad environmental impacts like temperature, dirt, moisture, or radiation. This article describes possibilities of reliability and safety assessment and optimisation of mobile systems.