Recurrent neural networks with long term temporal dependencies in machine tool wear diagnosis and prognosis

Data-driven approaches for machine tool wear diagnosis and prognosis are gaining attention in the past few years. The goal of our study is to advance the adaptability, flexibility, prediction performance, and prediction horizon for online monitoring and prediction. This paper proposes the use of a recent deep learning method, based on Gated Recurrent Neural Network architecture, including Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), which try to captures long-term dependencies than regular Recurrent Neural Network method for modeling sequential data, and also the mechanism to realize the online diagnosis and prognosis and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction with indirect measurement collected during the manufacturing process. Existing models are usually tool-specific and can hardly be generalized to other scenarios such as for different tools or operating environments. Different from current methods, the proposed model requires no prior knowledge about the system and thus can be generalized to different scenarios and machine tools. With inherent memory units, the proposed model can also capture long-term dependencies while learning from sequential data such as those collected by condition monitoring sensors, which means it can be accommodated to machine tools with varying life and increase the prediction performance. To prove the validity of the proposed approach, we conducted multiple experiments on a milling machine cutting tool and applied the model for online diagnosis and RUL prediction. Without loss of generality, we incorporate a system transition function and system observation function into the neural net and trained it with signal data from a minimally intrusive vibration sensor. The experiment results showed that our LSTM-based model achieved the best overall accuracy among other methods, with a minimal Mean Square Error (MSE) for tool wear prediction and RUL prediction respectively.