Tool wear prediction based on multidomain feature fusion by attention-based depth-wise separable convolutional neural network in manufacturing

Computer numerical control (CNC) machine tool is the foundation of the equipment manufacturing industry, and its technical level is an important indicator to measure the development level of a country’s equipment manufacturing industry. Tool wear during machining has a great impact on the important performance indicators of CNC machine tools, such as machining accuracy, machining efficiency and reliability. Tool wear monitoring is of great significance to improve the machining efficiency, machining accuracy and reliability of CNC machine tools. Multidomain features (time domain, frequency domain and time–frequency domain) can accurately characterise the degree of tool wear. However, manual feature fusion is time consuming and prevents the improvement of monitoring accuracy. A new tool wear prediction method based on multidomain feature fusion by attention-based depth-wise separable convolutional neural network is proposed to solve these problems. In this method, multidomain features of cutting force and vibration signals are extracted and recombined into feature tensors. The proposed hypercomplex position encoding and high-dimensional self-attention mechanism are used to calculate the new representation of input feature tensor, which emphasizes the tool wear sensitive information and suppresses large area background noise. The designed depth-wise separable convolutional neural network is used to adaptively extract high-level features that can characterise tool wear from the new representation, and the tool wear is predicted automatically. The proposed method is verified on three sets of tool run-to-failure data sets of three-flute ball nose cemented carbide tool in machining centre. Experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed method is remarkably higher than other state-of-art methods. Therefore, the proposed tool wear prediction method is beneficial to improve the prediction accuracy and provide effective guidance for decision making in processing.