Spacecraft Intelligent Fault Diagnosis under Variable Working Conditions via Wasserstein Distance-Based Deep Adversarial Transfer Learning

Abstract

In recent years, deep learning methods which promote the accuracy and efficiency of fault diagnosis task without any extra requirement of artificial feature extraction have elicited the attention of researchers in the field of manufacturing industry as well as aerospace. However, the problems that data in source and target domains usually have different probability distributions because of different working conditions and there are insufficient labeled or even unlabeled data in target domain significantly deteriorate the performance and generalization of deep fault diagnosis models. To address these problems, we propose a novel Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty- (WGAN-GP-) based deep adversarial transfer learning (WDATL) model in this study, which exploits a domain critic to learn domain invariant feature representations by minimizing the Wasserstein distance between the source and target feature distributions through adversarial training. Moreover, an improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network- (CNN-) based feature extractor which utilizes exponential linear units (ELU) as activation functions and wide kernels is designed to automatically extract the latent features of raw time-series input data. Then, the fault model classifier trained in one working condition (source domain) with sufficient labeled samples could be generalized to diagnose data in other working conditions (target domain) with insufficient labeled samples. Experiments on two open datasets demonstrate that our proposed WDATL model outperforms most of the state-of-the-art approaches on transfer diagnosis tasks under diverse working circumstances.