Perception systems provide a rich understanding of the environment for autonomous systems, shaping decisions in all downstream modules. Hence, accurate detection and isolation of faults in perception systems is important. Faults in perception systems pose particular challenges: faults are often tied to the perceptual context of the environment, and errors in their multi-stage pipelines can propagate across modules. To address this, we adopt a counterfactual reasoning approach to propose a framework for fault detection and isolation (FDI) in perception systems. As opposed to relying on physical redundancy (i.e., having extra sensors), our approach utilizes analytical redundancy with counterfactual reasoning to construct perception reliability tests as causal outcomes influenced by system states and fault scenarios. Counterfactual reasoning generates reliability test results under hypothesized faults to update the belief over fault hypotheses. We derive both passive and active FDI methods. While the passive FDI can be achieved by belief updates, the active FDI approach is defined as a causal bandit problem, where we utilize Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with upper confidence bound (UCB) to find control inputs that maximize a detection and isolation metric, designated as Effective Information (EI). The mentioned metric quantifies the informativeness of control inputs for FDI. We demonstrate the approach in a robot exploration scenario, where a space robot performing vision-based navigation actively adjusts its attitude to increase EI and correctly isolate faults caused by sensor damage, dynamic scenes, and perceptual degradation.

Global Navigation Satellite System/Inertial Navigation System (GNSS/INS)/Vision integration based on factor graph optimization (FGO) has recently attracted extensive attention in navigation and robotics community. Integrity monitoring (IM) capability is required when FGO-based integrated navigation system is used for safety-critical applications. However, traditional researches on IM of integrated navigation system are mostly based on Kalman filter. It is urgent to develop effective IM scheme for FGO-based GNSS/INS/Vision integration. In this contribution, the position error bounding formula to ensure the integrity of the GNSS/INS/Vision integration based on FGO is designed and validated for the first time. It can be calculated by the linearized equations from the residuals of GNSS pseudo-range, IMU pre-integration and visual measurements. The specific position error bounding is given in the case of GNSS, INS and visual measurement faults. Field experiments were conducted to evaluate and validate the performance of the proposed position error bounding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed position error bounding for the GNSS/INS/Vision integration based on FGO can correctly fit the position error against different fault modes, and the availability of integrity in six fault modes is 100% after correct and timely fault exclusion.

It is generally considered that a trustworthy autonomous planetary exploration rover must be able to operate safely and effectively within its environment. Central to trustworthy operation is the ability for the rover to recognise and diagnose abnormal behaviours during its operation. Failure to diagnose faulty behaviour could lead to degraded performance or an unplanned halt in operation. This work investigates a health monitoring method that can be used to improve the capabilities of a fault detection system for a planetary exploration rover. A suite of four metrics, named 'rover vitals', are evaluated as indicators of degradation in the rover's performance. These vitals are combined to give an overall estimate of the rover's 'health'. By comparing the behaviour of a faulty real system with a non-faulty observer, residuals are generated in terms of two high-level metrics: heading and velocity. Adaptive thresholds are applied to the residuals to enable the detection of faulty behaviour, where the adaptive thresholds are informed by the rover's perceived health. Simulation experiments carried out in MATLAB showed that the proposed health monitoring and fault detection methodology can detect high-risk faults in both the sensors and actuators of the rover.

With the development of intelligent manufacturing and the increasing complexity of industrial production, root cause diagnosis has gradually become an important research direction in the field of industrial fault diagnosis. However, existing research methods struggle to effectively combine domain knowledge and industrial data, failing to provide accurate, online, and reliable root cause diagnosis results for industrial processes. To address these issues, a novel fault root cause diagnosis framework based on knowledge graph and industrial data, called Root-KGD, is proposed. Root-KGD uses the knowledge graph to represent domain knowledge and employs data-driven modeling to extract fault features from industrial data. It then combines the knowledge graph and data features to perform knowledge graph reasoning for root cause identification. The performance of the proposed method is validated using two industrial process cases, Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) and Multiphase Flow Facility (MFF). Compared to existing methods, Root-KGD not only gives more accurate root cause variable diagnosis results but also provides interpretable fault-related information by locating faults to corresponding physical entities in knowledge graph (such as devices and streams). In addition, combined with its lightweight nature, Root-KGD is more effective in online industrial applications.

Data-driven fault classification is complicated by imbalanced training data and unknown fault classes. Fault diagnosis of dynamic systems is done by detecting changes in time-series data, for example residuals, caused by faults or system degradation. Different fault classes can result in similar residual outputs, especially for small faults which can be difficult to distinguish from nominal system operation. Analyzing how easy it is to distinguish data from different fault classes is crucial during the design process of a diagnosis system to evaluate if classification performance requirements can be met. Here, a data-driven model of different fault classes is used based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence. This is used to develop a framework for quantitative fault diagnosis performance analysis and open set fault classification. A data-driven fault classification algorithm is proposed which can handle unknown faults and also estimate the fault size using training data from known fault scenarios. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methods, data have been collected from an engine test bench to illustrate the design process of a data-driven diagnosis system, including quantitative fault diagnosis analysis and evaluation of the developed open set fault classification algorithm.

Reduced-order models that accurately abstract high fidelity models and enable faster simulation is vital for real-time, model-based diagnosis applications. In this paper, we outline a novel hybrid modeling approach that combines machine learning inspired models and physics-based models to generate reduced-order models from high fidelity models. We are using such models for real-time diagnosis applications. Specifically, we have developed machine learning inspired representations to generate reduced order component models that preserve, in part, the physical interpretation of the original high fidelity component models. To ensure the accuracy, scalability and numerical stability of the learning algorithms when training the reduced-order models we use optimization platforms featuring automatic differentiation. Training data is generated by simulating the high-fidelity model. We showcase our approach in the context of fault diagnosis of a rail switch system. Three new model abstractions whose complexities are two orders of magnitude smaller than the complexity of the high fidelity model, both in the number of equations and simulation time are shown. The numerical experiments and results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed hybrid modeling approach.

In Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) sufficient prior observed degradation data is usually critical for Remaining Useful Lifetime (RUL) prediction. Most previous data-driven prediction methods assume that training (source) and testing (target) condition monitoring data have similar distributions. However, due to different operating conditions, fault modes, noise and equipment updates distribution shift exists across different data domains. This shift reduces the performance of predictive models previously built to specific conditions when no observed run-to-failure data is available for retraining. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new data-driven approach for domain adaptation in prognostics using Long Short-Term Neural Networks (LSTM). We use a time window approach to extract temporal information from time-series data in a source domain with observed RUL values and a target domain containing only sensor information. We propose a Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) approach to learn domain-invariant features that can be used to predict the RUL in the target domain. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide more reliable RUL predictions under datasets with different operating conditions and fault modes. These results suggest that the proposed method offers a promising approach to performing domain adaptation in practical PHM applications.

The health state assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) estimation play very important roles in prognostics and health management (PHM), owing to their abilities to reduce the maintenance and improve the safety of machines or equipment. However, they generally suffer from this problem of lacking prior knowledge to pre-define the exact failure thresholds for a machinery operating in a dynamic environment with a high level of uncertainty. In this case, dynamic thresholds depicted by the discrete states is a very attractive way to estimate the RUL of a dynamic machinery. Currently, there are only very few works considering the dynamic thresholds, and these studies adopted different algorithms to determine the discrete states and predict the continuous states separately, which largely increases the complexity of the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel prognostics approach for RUL estimation of aero-engines with self-joint prediction of continuous and discrete states, wherein the prediction of continuous and discrete states are conducted simultaneously and dynamically within one learning framework.

We propose a theory of abstraction of discrete-event systems (DES) formulated at the semantic level, i.e., as a function that maps event traces at the original (ground) level to traces at the abstract level. We study how diagnosis of DES can be performed using an abstract model, and under which conditions this process leads to a correct solution (i.e., a set of alternative diagnoses that include the real status of the system). Finally, we study how the use of an abstract model can affect the precision of diagnosis, i.e., the presence of spurious system states in the solution. To this end, we introduce the notion of diagnosability with abstract models, which ensures the precision of abstract diagnoses, and we discuss a practical way to test it.