Intelligent Fault Detection, Diagnosis and Health Evaluation for Industrial Robots

The focus of this study is development of an intelligent fault detection, diagnosis and health evaluation system for real industrial robots. The system uses principal component analysis based statistical process control with Nelson rules for online fault detection. Several suitable Nelson rules are chosen for sensitive detection. When a variation is detected, the system performs a diagnostic operation to acquire features of the time domain and the frequency domain from the motor encoder, motor current sensor and external accelerometer for fault diagnosis with a multi-class support vector machine. Additionally, a fuzzy logic based robot health index generator is proposed for evaluating the health of the robot, and the generator is an original design to reflect the health status of the robot. Finally, several real aging-related faults are implemented on a six-axis industrial robot, DRV90L7A6213N by Delta Electronics, and the proposed system is validated effectively by the experimental results.