Continuous Online Fault Detection for Mobile Robots via Adaptive Edge Models

Abstract:Mobile robots require robust, real-time fault detection capable of continuous adaptation on constrained edge hardware. While deep time-series models excel at unsupervised anomaly detection, their computational cost prohibits high-frequency onboard execution. This paper bridges this gap via a Teacher-Student distillation framework. An offline foundation model (TSPulse) generates pseudo-labels from unlabeled time series augmented with fault injections. A lightweight MiniRocket Student, adapted with a Recursive Least Squares estimator, approximates this complex decision boundary to execute real-time inference onboard. Evaluations on the TSB-AD benchmark and a physical mobile robot demonstrate the Student achieves a 4.30 ms CPU inference latency. During real-world domain shifts, online adaptation enables the Student to recover from unseen mechanical degradation, improving VUS-PR scores from 0.26 to 0.75 without catastrophic forgetting. Crucially, an uncertainty-guided active learning strategy minimizes operator cognitive load, requesting sparse interventions only when encountering novel fault distributions. These results validate the deployment of state-of-the-art anomaly detection on resource-constrained robotics through offline-to-online distillation.

Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.29194 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.29194v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.29194 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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