Ubiquitous Domain Adaptation at the Edge for Vibration-based Machine Status Monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents a Ubiquitous Domain Adaptation (UDA) and generalizability technique for vibration-based automated machine status monitoring at the edge. The method significantly reduces the effects of signal noise artifacts and device/usage-specific vibration signatures using basic time-frequency domain signal operations and a lightweight ensemble of data-driven classifiers, allowing the method to be used for reliable domain-invariant status monitoring of motorized equipment. An experimental setup using vibration data from an air-cooled electric blender motor (source-domain) is used to train an automated machine state identification classifier that can identify the operating states of an eccentric rotating mass vibration motor (target-domain). Initial deployment of this method on target-domain motorized devices resulted in a machine status monitoring accuracy of at least 81.6% and a maximum training accuracy of almost 99% on known data of the source-domain and 91.49% for unseen data in the target-domain within an acceptable time frame. The performance of the proposed method is also comparable across platforms ranging from resource-constrained edge to a resource-rich cloud. This approach facilitates the use of noisy or uncalibrated sensor data in data-driven machine status monitoring tasks, therefore allowing for the development of reusable, low-cost monitoring systems that require meagre developmental effort, resulting in accelerated deployment times.