Continuous Online Fault Detection for Mobile Robots via Adaptive Edge Models

Detecting objects with visual sensors is crucial for numerous mobile robotics applications, from autonomous navigation to inspection. However, robots often need to operate under significant domains shifts from those they were trained in, requiring them to adjust to these changes. Tiny mobile robots, subject to size, power, and computational constraints, face even greater challenges when running and adapting detection models on low-resolution and noisy images. Such adaptability, though, is crucial for real-world deployment, where robots must operate effectively in dynamic and unpredictable settings. In this work, we introduce a new vision benchmark to evaluate lightweight continual learning strategies tailored to the unique characteristics of tiny robotic platforms. Our contributions include: (i) Tiny Robotics Object Detection~(TiROD), a challenging video dataset collected using the onboard camera of a small mobile robot, designed to test object detectors across various domains and classes; (ii) a comprehensive benchmark of several continual learning strategies on different scenarios using NanoDet, a lightweight, real-time object detector for resource-constrained devices.. Our results highlight some key challenges in developing robust and efficient continual learning strategies for object detectors in tiny robotics.es; (ii) a benchmark of different continual learning strategies on this dataset using NanoDet, a lightweight object detector. Our results highlight key challenges in developing robust and efficient continual learning strategies for object detectors in tiny robotics.

Continual anomaly detection (CAD) addresses the need for industrial inspection systems to adapt to evolving production conditions, yet existing methods share three critical gaps: unrealistic evaluation, no systematic comparison, and no consideration of edge deployment constraints. We introduce a unified benchmark combining discrete-task evaluation on structural and logical anomalies, a novel continuous drift protocol, the first head-to-head comparison of all published CAD methods, and computational efficiency profiling on edge hardware. Our results reveal that existing CAD methods do not consistently outperform traditional approaches with simple experience replay. Thus motivated, we propose DINOSaur, a training-free method combining a frozen DINOv3 backbone with spatially-indexed coreset memory and neighborhood-restricted anomaly scoring. DINOSaur achieves zero forgetting by construction, outperforms all evaluated methods across all five protocols, and runs at sub-100,ms inference on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, with on-device adaptation to new tasks in under 30 seconds.

On-device fault detection enables real-time diagnostics without cloud dependency, but deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained hardware demands careful tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and model size. We present a benchmark comparing traditional ML methods (Random Forest, XGBoost, SVM, Logistic Regression) against lightweight transformer architectures (DistilBERT, TinyBERT-6L, TinyBERT-4L, MobileBERT) for binary fault detection across three public datasets: NASA C-MAPSS turbofan degradation, SECOM semiconductor manufacturing, and UCI AI4I 2020 predictive maintenance. We evaluate classification performance (F1-score, AUC), model size, and CPU inference latency, and further assess INT8 dynamic quantization and a two-stage adaptive inference pipeline. Our results reveal that on well-separated sensor data (C-MAPSS), lightweight transformers match traditional ML at 87.8% F1 but at 100x the model size and 9000x the latency. TinyBERT-4L emerges as the most deployment-friendly transformer at 55 MB and 18 ms CPU latency. INT8 quantization reduces size by 25% while preserving 86.9% F1. Our adaptive pipeline, routing 97.9% of predictions through a quantized triage model and only 2.1% to a larger expert, achieves 87.6% F1 at 19.5 ms average latency. On severely imbalanced datasets (SECOM, UCI-PM), both traditional and transformer methods struggle significantly, highlighting fundamental limitations of current approaches for extreme class imbalance in fault detection. All code is publicly available.