Deep Scattering Spectrum Germaneness for Fault Detection and Diagnosis for Component-Level Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)

Most methodologies for fault detection and diagnosis in prognostics and health management (PHM) systems use machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL), in which either some features are extracted beforehand (in the case of typical ML approaches) or the filters are used to extract features autonomously (in the case of DL) to perform the critical classification task. In particular, in the fault detection and diagnosis of industrial robots where the primary sources of information are electric current, vibration, or acoustic emissions signals that are rich in information in both the temporal and frequency domains, techniques capable of extracting meaningful information from non-stationary frequency-domain signals with the ability to map the signals into their constituent components with compressed information are required. This has the potential to minimise the complexity and size of traditional ML- and DL-based frameworks. The deep scattering spectrum (DSS) is one of the approaches that use the Wavelet Transform (WT) analogy for separating and extracting information embedded in a signal’s various temporal and frequency domains. Therefore, the primary focus of this work is the investigation of the efficacy and applicability of the DSS’s feature domain relative to fault detection and diagnosis for the mechanical components of industrial robots. For this, multiple industrial robots with distinct mechanical faults were studied. Data were collected from these robots under different fault conditions and an approach was developed for classifying the faults using DSS’s low-variance features extracted from input signals. The presented approach was implemented on the practical test benches and demonstrated satisfactory performance in fault detection and diagnosis for simple and complex classification problems with a classification accuracy of 99.7% and 88.1%, respectively. The results suggest that, similarly to other ML techniques, the DSS offers significant potential in addressing fault classification challenges, especially for cases where the data are in the form of signals.