Fault Injection
Deliberately introducing failures into a running system to verify how it handles them. In ROS2 testing: dropping messages on a topic, delaying delivery, killing a node, corrupting payloads. ISO 26262 calls these "fault injection tests" and they're required for the highest ASIL levels.
Why It Matters
Robotics failures rarely happen during nominal operation — they happen when something goes wrong. Tests that only cover the happy path miss the actual failure modes. Fault injection forces tests to exercise the system under degraded conditions.
How Roboticks Implements It
The Roboticks SDK ships drop_messages, delay_messages, kill_node, and corrupt_topic context managers. Combine with @confirms to link a fault-injection test to a specific requirement (e.g. "system halts safely when LIDAR drops 50% of frames").