All failure detection methods are based, either explicitly or implicitly, on the use of redundancy, i.e. on (possibly dynamic) relations among the measured variables. The robustness of the failure detection process consequently depends to a great degree on the reliability of the redundancy relations, which in turn is affected by the inevitable presence of model uncertainties.In this paper we address the problem of determining redundancy relations that are optimally robust, in a sense that includes several major issues .of importance in practical failure detection, and that provides a significant amount of intuition concerning the geometry of robust failure detection. We also give a procedure, involving the construction of a single matrix and its singular value decomposition, for the determination of a complete sequence of redundancy relations, ordered in terms of their level of robustness. This procedure also provides the basis for comparing levels of robustness in redundancy provided by different sets of sensors.