In recent automated manufacturing systems, compressed air-based pneumatic cylinders have been widely used for basic perpetration including picking up and moving a target object. They are relatively categorized as small machines, but many linear or rotary cylinders play an important role in discrete manufacturing systems. Therefore, sudden operation stop or interruption due to a fault occurrence in pneumatic cylinders leads to a decrease in repair costs and production and even threatens the safety of workers. In this regard, this study proposed a fault detection technique by developing a time-variant deep learning model from multivariate sensor data analysis for estimating a current health state as four levels. In addition, it aims to establish a real-time fault detection system that allows workers to immediately identify and manage the cylinder’s status in either an actual shop floor or a remote management situation. To validate and verify the performance of the proposed system, we collected multivariate sensor signals from a rotary cylinder and it was successful in detecting the health state of the pneumatic cylinder with four severity levels. Furthermore, the optimal sensor location and signal type were analyzed through statistical inferences.

As mechatronic systems have various, complex functions and require high performance, automatic fault detection is necessary for secure operation in manufacturing processes. For conducting automatic and real-time fault detection in modern mechatronic systems, multiple sensor signals are collected by internet of things technologies. Since traditional statistical control charts or machine learning approaches show significant results with unified and solid density models under normal operating states but they have limitations with scattered signal models under normal states, many pattern extraction and matching approaches have been paid attention. Signal discretization-based pattern extraction methods are one of popular signal analyses, which reduce the size of the given datasets as much as possible as well as highlight significant and inherent signal behaviors. Since general pattern extraction methods are usually conducted with a fixed size of time segmentation, they can easily cut off significant behaviors, and consequently the performance of the extracted fault patterns will be reduced. In this regard, adjustable time segmentation is proposed to extract much meaningful fault patterns in multiple sensor signals. By considering inflection points of signals, we determine the optimal cut-points of time segments in each sensor signal. In addition, to clarify the inflection points, we apply Savitzky-golay filter to the original datasets. To validate and verify the performance of the proposed segmentation, the dataset collected from an aircraft engine (provided by NASA prognostics center) is used to fault pattern extraction. As a result, the proposed adjustable time segmentation shows better performance in fault pattern extraction.

A lot of sensor and control signals is generated by an industrial controller and related internet-of-things in discrete manufacturing system. The acquired signals are such records indicating whether several process operations have been correctly conducted or not in the system, therefore they are usually composed of binary numbers. For example, once a certain sensor turns on, the corresponding value is changed from 0 to 1, and it means the process is finished the previous operation and ready to conduct next operation. If an actuator starts to move, the corresponding value is changed from 0 to 1 and it indicates the corresponding operation is been conducting. Because traditional fault detection approaches are generally conducted with analog sensor signals and the signals show stationary during normal operation states, it is not simple to identify whether the manufacturing process works properly via conventional fault detection methods. However, digital control signals collected from a programmable logic controller continuously vary during normal process operation in order to show inherent sequence information which indicates the conducting operation tasks. Therefore, in this research, it is proposed to a recurrent neural network-based fault detection approach for considering sequential patterns in normal states of the manufacturing process. Using the constructed long short-term memory based fault detection, it is possible to predict the next control signals and detect faulty states by compared the predicted and real control signals in real-time. We validated and verified the proposed fault detection methods using digital control signals which are collected from a laser marking process, and the method provide good detection performance only using binary values.