Residual attention temporal recurrent network for fault diagnosis of gearboxes under limited labeled data

Data-driven fault diagnosis methods have significantly contributed to the rapid development of prognostics and health management of gearboxes. However, these methods require sufficient labeled data for model training. In real industrial scenarios, labeled data is usually scarce. Thus, a residual attention temporal recurrent network is proposed for fault diagnosis of gearboxes under limited labeled data. More specifically, a fault diagnosis framework with self-supervised sample generation learning is explored in this paper. First, a small amount of labeled data is utilized to self-supervise the generation of new samples with similar semantics in adversarial generation modeling. Second, a temporal recurrent network with residual attention is constructed to extract fault features of vibration signals using two-stage temporal and recursive operations. In addition, the construction of the residual attention mechanism can facilitate the network to have a deeper semantic understanding of the vibration signal. Finally, the model can guarantee a more robust classifier in the proposed fault diagnosis framework using a small number of labeled samples. The extensive validation of the proposed method is performed on the gearbox dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve competitive fault diagnosis performance under limited labeled data.