Attitude data-based deep hybrid learning architecture for intelligent fault diagnosis of multi-joint industrial robots

Abstract

Monitoring the transmission status of multi-joint industrial robots is very important for the accuracy of the robot motion. The fault diagnosis information is an indispensable basis for the collaborative maintenance of the robots in industry 4.0. In this paper, an attitude data-based intelligent fault diagnosis approach is proposed for multi-joint industrial robots. Based on the analysis of the transmission mechanism, the attitude change of the last joint is employed to reflect the transmission fault of robot components. An economical data acquisition strategy is performed by only installing one attitude sensor on the last joint of the multi-joint robot. Considering the characteristics of attitude data, a hybrid sparse auto-encoder (SAE) and support vector machine (SVM) approach, namely SAE-SVM, is subsequently presented to construct an intelligent fault diagnosis model by learning from the attitude dataset with multiple fault information. Experimental results show that the proposed fault diagnosis approach has promising performance in identifying different faults related to the reducer of a 6-axial multi-joint industrial robot accurately and reliably.