Root Cause Analysis Methodology of ESD Soft-Failure Applied to a Robot

A complex system such as a human assisting robot will have many sensors and use parallel processing for achieving the desired action. During a transient disturbance, such as an electrostatic discharge (ESD), one or many of these sensors can be disturbed. In this study, the detect/presence logic is toggled, consequently, the microcontroller reads the sensor status as disabled. This is a soft-failure which can be recovered by a power cycle of the system. Here a case study is investigated where a methodology is developed to help system designers to understand and model the cause of the sensor failure during an ESD event. This methodology will also help system designers to design efficient filters on the critical signal lines to minimize the effect of coupled noise.