Ubiquitous Domain Adaptation at the Edge for Vibration-Based Machine Status Monitoring

Abstract

This article presents a ubiquitous domain adaptation (UDA) and generalizability technique for vibration-based automated machine status monitoring at the edge. The method significantly reduces the effects of signal noise artifacts and device/usage-specific vibration signatures using basic time-frequency domain signal operations and a lightweight ensemble of data-driven classifiers, allowing the method to be used for reliable domain-invariant status monitoring of motorized equipment. An experimental setup using vibration data from an air-cooled electric blender motor (source domain) is used to train an automated machine state identification classifier that can identify the operating states of an eccentric rotating mass vibration motor (target domain). Initial deployment of this method on target-domain motorized devices resulted in a machine status monitoring accuracy of at least 81.6% and a maximum training accuracy of almost 99% on known data of the source domain and 91.49% for unseen data in the target domain within an acceptable time frame. The performance of the proposed method is also comparable across platforms ranging from resource-constrained edge to a resource-rich cloud. This approach facilitates the use of noisy or uncalibrated sensor data in data-driven machine status monitoring tasks, therefore allowing for the development of reusable, low-cost monitoring systems that require meagre developmental effort, resulting in accelerated deployment times.