Increasing the robustness of autonomous systems to hardware degradation using machine learning

Autonomous systems perform predetermined tasks (missions) with minimum supervision. In most applications, the state of the world changes with time. Sensors are employed to measure part or whole of the world’s state. However, sensors often fail amidst operation; feeding as such decision-making with wrong information about the world. Moreover, hardware degradation may alter dynamic behaviour, and subsequently the capabilities, of an autonomous system; rendering the original mission infeasible. This thesis applies machine learning to yield powerful and robust tools that can facilitate autonomy in modern systems. Incremental kernel regression is used for dynamic modelling. Algorithms of this sort are easy to train and are highly adaptive. Adaptivity allows for model adjustments, whenever the environment of operation changes. Bayesian reasoning provides a rigorous framework for addressing uncertainty. Moreover, using Bayesian Networks, complex inference regarding hardware degradation can be answered. Specifically, adaptive modelling is combined with Bayesian reasoning to yield recursive estimation algorithms that are robust to sensor failures. Two solutions are presented by extending existing recursive estimation algorithms from the robotics literature. The algorithms are deployed on an underwater vehicle and the performance is assessed in real-world experiments. A comparison against standard filters is also provided. Next, the previous algorithms are extended to consider sensor and actuator failures jointly. An algorithm that can detect thruster failures in an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle has been developed. Moreover, the algorithm adapts the dynamic model online to compensate for the detected fault. The performance of this algorithm was also tested in a real-world application. One step further than hardware fault detection, prognostics predict how much longer can a particular hardware component operate normally. Ubiquitous sensors in modern systems render data-driven prognostics a viable solution. However, training is based on skewed datasets; datasets where the samples from the faulty region of operation are much fewer than the ones from the healthy region of operation. This thesis presents a prognostic algorithm that tackles the problem of imbalanced (skewed) datasets

On robust and adaptive soft sensors.

In process industries, there is a great demand for additional process information such as the product quality level or the exact process state estimation. At the same time, there is a large amount of process data like temperatures, pressures, etc. measured and stored every moment. This data is mainly measured for process control and monitoring purposes but its potential reaches far beyond these applications. The task of soft sensors is the maximal exploitation of this potential by extracting and transforming the latent information from the data into more useful process knowledge. Theoretically, achieving this goal should be straightforward since the process data as well as the tools for soft sensor development in the form of computational learning methods, are both readily available. However, contrary to this evidence, there are still several obstacles which prevent soft sensors from broader application in the process industry. The identification of the sources of these obstacles and proposing a concept for dealing with them is the general purpose of this work. The proposed solution addressing the issues of current soft sensors is a conceptual architecture for the development of robust and adaptive soft sensing algorithms. The architecture reflects the results of two review studies that were conducted during this project. The first one focuses on the process industry aspects of soft sensor development and application. The main conclusions of this study are that soft sensor development is currently being done in a non-systematic, ad-hoc way which results in a large amount of manual work needed for their development and maintenance. It is also found that a large part of the issues can be related to the process data upon which the soft sensors are built. The second review study dealt with the same topic but this time it was biased towards the machine learning viewpoint. The review focused on the identification of machine learning tools, which support the goals of this work. The machine learning concepts which are considered are: (i) general regression techniques for building of soft sensors; (ii) ensemble methods; (iii) local learning; (iv) meta-learning; and (v) concept drift detection and handling. The proposed architecture arranges the above techniques into a three-level hierarchy, where the actual prediction-making models operate at the bottom level. Their predictions are flexibly merged by applying ensemble methods at the next higher level. Finally from the top level, the underlying algorithm is managed by means of metalearning methods. The architecture has a modular structure that allows new pre-processing, predictive or adaptation methods to be plugged in. Another important property of the architecture is that each of the levels can be equipped with adaptation mechanisms, which aim at prolonging the lifetime of the resulting soft sensors. The relevance of the architecture is demonstrated by means of a complex soft sensing algorithm, which can be seen as its instance. This algorithm provides mechanisms for autonomous selection of data preprocessing and predictive methods and their parameters. It also includes five different adaptation mechanisms, some of which can be applied on a sample-by-sample basis without any requirement to store the on-line data. Other, more complex ones are started only on-demand if the performance of the soft sensor drops below a defined level. The actual soft sensors are built by applying the soft sensing algorithm to three industrial data sets. The different application scenarios aim at the analysis of the fulfilment of the defined goals. It is shown that the soft sensors are able to follow changes in dynamic environment and keep a stable performance level by exploiting the implemented adaptation mechanisms. It is also demonstrated that, although the algorithm is rather complex, it can be applied to develop simple and transparent soft sensors. In another experiment, the soft sensors are built without any manual model selection or parameter tuning, which demonstrates the ability of the algorithm to reduce the effort required for soft sensor development. However, if desirable, the algorithm is at the same time very flexible and provides a number of parameters that can be manually optimised. Evidence of the ability of the algorithm to deploy soft sensors with minimal training data and as such to provide the possibility to save the time consuming and costly training data collection is also given in this work

An energy-aware architecture : a practical implementation for autonomous underwater vehicles

Energy awareness, fault tolerance and performance estimation are important aspects for extending the autonomy levels of today’s autonomous vehicles. Those are related to the concepts of survivability and reliability, two important factors that often limit the trust of end users in conducting large-scale deployments of such vehicles. With the aim of preparing the way for persistent autonomous operations this work focuses its efforts on investigating those effects on underwater vehicles capable of long-term missions. A novel energy-aware architecture for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is presented. This, by monitoring at runtime the vehicle’s energy usage, is capable of detecting and mitigating failures in the propulsion subsystem, one of the most common sources of mission-time problems. Furthermore it estimates the vehicle’s performance when operating in unknown environments and in the presence of external disturbances. These capabilities are a great contribution for reducing the operational uncertainty that most underwater platforms face during their deployment. Using knowledge collected while conducting real missions the proposed architecture allows the optimisation of on-board resource usage. This improves the vehicle’s effectiveness when operating in unknown stochastic scenarios or when facing the problem of resource scarcity. The architecture has been implemented on a real vehicle, Nessie AUV, used for real sea experiments as part of multiple research projects. These gave the opportunity of evaluating the improvements of the proposed system when considering more complex autonomous tasks. Together with Nessie AUV, the commercial platform IVER3 AUV has been involved in the evaluating the feasibility of this approach. Results and operational experience, gathered both in real sea scenarios and in controlled environment experiments, are discussed in detail showing the benefits and the operational constraints of the introduced architecture, alongside suggestions for future research directions

Parameter-varying modelling and fault reconstruction for wind turbine systems

In this paper, parameter-varying technique is firstly addressed for modelling a 4.8 MW wind turbine system which is nonlinear in essence. It is worthy to point out that the proposed parameter-varying model is capable of describing a nonlinear real-time process by using real-time system parameter updating. Secondly, fault reconstruction approach is proposed to reconstruct system component fault and actuator fault by utilizing augmented adaptive observer technique with parameter-varying. Different from the offline tuning adaptive scheme, the proposed adaptive observer includes adaptive tuning ability to online adjust the observer based on varying parameter. The effectiveness of the proposed parameter-varying modelling and fault reconstruction methods is demonstrated by using a widely-recognized 4.8 MW wind turbine benchmark system

On robust and adaptive soft sensors

In process industries, there is a great demand for additional process information such as the product quality level or the exact process state estimation. At the same time, there is a large amount of process data like temperatures, pressures, etc. measured and stored every moment. This data is mainly measured for process control and monitoring purposes but its potential reaches far beyond these applications. The task of soft sensors is the maximal exploitation of this potential by extracting and transforming the latent information from the data into more useful process knowledge. Theoretically, achieving this goal should be straightforward since the process data as well as the tools for soft sensor development in the form of computational learning methods, are both readily available. However, contrary to this evidence, there are still several obstacles which prevent soft sensors from broader application in the process industry. The identification of the sources of these obstacles and proposing a concept for dealing with them is the general purpose of this work. The proposed solution addressing the issues of current soft sensors is a conceptual architecture for the development of robust and adaptive soft sensing algorithms. The architecture reflects the results of two review studies that were conducted during this project. The first one focuses on the process industry aspects of soft sensor development and application. The main conclusions of this study are that soft sensor development is currently being done in a non-systematic, ad-hoc way which results in a large amount of manual work needed for their development and maintenance. It is also found that a large part of the issues can be related to the process data upon which the soft sensors are built. The second review study dealt with the same topic but this time it was biased towards the machine learning viewpoint. The review focused on the identification of machine learning tools, which support the goals of this work. The machine learning concepts which are considered are: (i) general regression techniques for building of soft sensors; (ii) ensemble methods; (iii) local learning; (iv) meta-learning; and (v) concept drift detection and handling. The proposed architecture arranges the above techniques into a three-level hierarchy, where the actual prediction-making models operate at the bottom level. Their predictions are flexibly merged by applying ensemble methods at the next higher level. Finally from the top level, the underlying algorithm is managed by means of metalearning methods. The architecture has a modular structure that allows new pre-processing, predictive or adaptation methods to be plugged in. Another important property of the architecture is that each of the levels can be equipped with adaptation mechanisms, which aim at prolonging the lifetime of the resulting soft sensors. The relevance of the architecture is demonstrated by means of a complex soft sensing algorithm, which can be seen as its instance. This algorithm provides mechanisms for autonomous selection of data preprocessing and predictive methods and their parameters. It also includes five different adaptation mechanisms, some of which can be applied on a sample-by-sample basis without any requirement to store the on-line data. Other, more complex ones are started only on-demand if the performance of the soft sensor drops below a defined level. The actual soft sensors are built by applying the soft sensing algorithm to three industrial data sets. The different application scenarios aim at the analysis of the fulfilment of the defined goals. It is shown that the soft sensors are able to follow changes in dynamic environment and keep a stable performance level by exploiting the implemented adaptation mechanisms. It is also demonstrated that, although the algorithm is rather complex, it can be applied to develop simple and transparent soft sensors. In another experiment, the soft sensors are built without any manual model selection or parameter tuning, which demonstrates the ability of the algorithm to reduce the effort required for soft sensor development. However, if desirable, the algorithm is at the same time very flexible and provides a number of parameters that can be manually optimised. Evidence of the ability of the algorithm to deploy soft sensors with minimal training data and as such to provide the possibility to save the time consuming and costly training data collection is also given in this work.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

An improved mixture of probabilistic PCA for nonlinear data-driven process monitoring

An improved mixture of probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) has been introduced for nonlinear data-driven process monitoring in this paper. To realize this purpose, the technique of a mixture of probabilistic principal component analyzers is utilized to establish the model of the underlying nonlinear process with local PPCA models, where a novel composite monitoring statistic is proposed based on the integration of two monitoring statistics in modified PPCA-based fault detection approach. Besides, the weighted mean of the monitoring statistics aforementioned is utilized as a metrics to detect potential abnormalities. The virtues of the proposed algorithm are discussed in comparison with several unsupervised algorithms. Finally, Tennessee Eastman process and an autosuspension model are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme further

Canonical variate analysis for performance degradation under faulty conditions

Condition monitoring of industrial processes can minimize maintenance and operating costs while increasing the process safety and enhancing the quality of the product. In order to achieve these goals it is necessary not only to detect and diagnose process faults, but also to react to them by scheduling the maintenance and production according to the condition of the process. The objective of this investigation is to test the capabilities of canonical variate analysis (CVA) to estimate performance degradation and predict the behavior of a system affected by faults. Process data was acquired from a large-scale experimental multiphase flow facility operated under changing operational conditions where process faults were seeded. The results suggest that CVA can be used effectively to evaluate how faults affect the process variables in comparison to normal operation. The method also predicted future process behavior after the appearance of faults, modeling the system using data collected during the early stages of degradation

A Hybrid Process Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis Approach for Chemical Plants

Given their potentially enormous risk, process monitoring and fault diagnosis for chemical plants have recently been the focus of many studies. Based on hazard and operability (HAZOP) analysis, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA), wavelet neural network (WNN), and fault tree analysis (FTA), a hybrid process monitoring and fault diagnosis approach is proposed in this study. HAZOP analysis helps identify the fault modes and determine process variables monitored. The KPCA model is then constructed to reduce monitoring variable dimensionality. Meanwhile, the fault features of the monitoring variables are extracted, so then process monitoring can be performed with the squared prediction error (SPE) statistics of KPCA. Then, multiple WNN models are designed through the use of low-dimensional sample data preprocessed by KPCA as the training and test samples to detect the fault mode online. Finally, FTA approach is introduced to further locate the fault root causes of the fault mode. The proposed approach is applied to process monitoring and fault diagnosis in a depropanizer unit. Case study results indicate that this approach can be applicable to process monitoring and diagnosis in large-scale chemical plants. Accordingly, the approach can serve as an early and reliable basis for technicians’ and operators’ safety management decision-making

Defect Detection and Localization of Nonlinear System Based on Particle Filter with an Adaptive Parametric Model

A robust particle filter (PF) and its application to fault/defect detection of nonlinear system are investigated in this paper. First, an adaptive parametric model is exploited as the observation model for a nonlinear system. Second, by incorporating the parametric model, particle filter is employed to estimate more accurate hidden states for the nonlinear stochastic system. Third, by formulating the problem of defect detection within the hypothesis testing framework, the statistical properties of the proposed testing are established. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed detector on real defect detection and localization in images

Canonical Variate Analysis for Performance Degradation under Faulty Conditions

Condition monitoring of industrial processes can minimize maintenance and operating costs while increasing the process safety and enhancing the quality of the product. In order to achieve these goals it is necessary not only to detect and diagnose process faults, but also to react to them by scheduling the maintenance and production according to the condition of the process. The objective of this investigation is to test the capabilities of canonical variate analysis (CVA) to estimate performance degradation and predict the behaviour of a system affected by faults. Process data was acquired from a large-scale experimental multiphase flow facility operated under changing operational conditions where process faults were seeded. The results suggest that CVA can be used effectively to evaluate how faults affect the process variables in comparison to normal operation. The method also predicted future process behaviour after the appearance of faults, modelling the system using data collected during the early stages of degradation