Rotate Vector Reducer Crankshaft Fault Diagnosis Using Acoustic Emission Techniques

Rotate Vector (RV) reducer is widely used in robotics because of its high precision and stiffness. However, the long-term operation leads to unpredictable reducer failures due to the inevitable abrasions of mechanical parts. To this end, this paper is intentionally designed to diagnose the RV reducer crankshaft abrasion faults using acoustic emission (AE) techniques. Firstly, the AE signal features with various speeds and workloads are extracted and analyzed in both time domain and frequency domain. Secondly, the crankshaft abrasion effects are qualitatively evaluated using these time-frequency features. Extensive experiments are conducted on our built RV reducer robotic platform. The experimental results prove that our method is able to effectively detect RV reducer crankshaft faults.