Autoencoder-based anomaly detection of industrial robot arm using stethoscope based internal sound sensor

Sound and vibration analysis are prominent tools for machine health diagnosis. Especially, neural network (NN) strategies have focused on finding complex and nonlinear relationships between the sensor signal and the machine status to detect machine faults. However, it is difficult to collect enough amount of fault data as much as normal status data for training general NN models. To resolve the issue, this paper proposes the autoencoder-based anomaly detection framework for industrial robot arms using an internal sound sensor. The autoencoder uses signals in the normal state of the robots for training the model. It reconstructs the input signals as output, and anomalous states are found from high reconstruction error. Two stethoscopes were attached to the surface of the robot joint as sensors, and the sounds were recorded by USB microphone attached to the outlet of the stethoscopes. Features were extracted from STFT spectrogram images of the gathered sound, then used to train and test an autoencoder model. The reconstruction errors of the autoencoder were compared to distinguish the abnormal status from normal one. The experimental results suggest that the stethoscopes prevent the interference of noise, and the collected sound signals can be utilized for detecting machine anomalies.