Leveraging Neural Architecture Search for Structural Health Monitoring on Resource-Constrained Devices

In recent decades signal processing incorporated the capabilities offered by Deep Learning (DL) models, especially for complex tasks. DL models demand significant memory, power, and computational resources, posing challenges for Microcontroller Units (MCUs) with limited capacities. The possibility to run models directly on the edge device is key in connectivity-limited scenarios such as Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). For those scenarios, it is necessary to use Tiny Machine Learning techniques to reduces computational requirements. This study focuses on the impact of the extended version of the state-of-the-art Neural Architecture Search (NAS) tool, μNAS, for SHM applications, targeting four commonly used MCUs. Our assessment is based on the Z24 Bridge benchmark dataset, a common dataset for SHM we employed to train and evaluate models. We then discuss if the models found fit the constraints of the MCUs and the possible tradeoffs between error rate and model computational requirements. We also offer a comparison with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to highlight μNAS’s capability in achieving high accuracy with higher computing capabilities. The obtained results are promising, as the found models satisfy the given constraints both in term of accuracy and memory footprint.