Advancing the incremental fusion of robotic sensory features using online multi-kernel extreme learning machine

Robot recognition tasks usually require multiple homogeneous or heterogeneous sensors which intrinsically generate sequential, redundant, and storage demanding data with various noise pollution. Thus, online machine learning algorithms performing efficient sensory feature fusion have become a hot topic in robot recognition domain. This paper proposes an online multi-kernel extreme learning machine (OM-ELM) which assembles multiple ELM classifiers and optimizes the kernel weights with a p-norm formulation of multi-kernel learning (MKL) problem. It can be applied in feature fusion applications that require incremental learning over multiple sequential sensory readings. The performance of OM-ELM is tested towards four different robot recognition tasks. By comparing to several state-of-the-art online models for multi-kernel learning, we claim that our method achieves a superior or equivalent training accuracy and generalization ability with less training time. Practical suggestions are also given to aid effective online fusion of robot sensory features.