A study on rotate vector reducer performance degradation based on acoustic emission techniques This paper presents a performance degradation analysis for rotate vector (RV) reducer using acoustic emission (AE) techniques. Unlike the AE signals from fixed gear reducer that are steady and have unchanged route, the AE signals from RV reducer have variant propagation paths and strengths. This work investigates the kinematics model using AE techniques to solve the inherent issues of RV reducer performance degradation analysis, such as signal variabilities and inappropriate thresholds. Firstly, the propagation path of AE signals within the crankshaft is developed. Secondly, the attenuation trend of AE signals is exponentially formulated based on the corresponding propagation curve. The proposed method has been evaluated on the developed RV reducer platform. AE signals were collected under various working conditions, i.e., four abrasion states with eight types of loads and five rotation speeds. The experimental analysis on typical parameters (e.g., signal energies) proves the effectiveness and accuracy of the developed method based on AE techniques.

Industrial Robot Rotate Vector Reducer Fault Detection Based on Hidden Markov Models Reliable fault detection of rotate vector (RV) reducer is of paramount importance for the longterm maintenance of highprecision industrial robots. This paper proposes a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based RV reducer fault detection using Acoustic Emission (AE) measurements. Compared with the conventional faults from the common rotating machinery (such as bearings and gears), the fault from the RV reducer is more complicated and undetectable due to its inherent inline and twostage meshing structure. To this end, this work modifies the HMM model by taking into account not only the current observations and previous states, but also the subsequent series of observations within the posteriori probability framework. Through this way, the random and unknown disturbance, which is common in the industrial scenarios, could be reduced. Besides, the HMM is also applied to separate the AE signal bulks within one cycle that has 39 subcycles, which is a critical step for AE signal preprocessings. The proposed method has been evaluated on our collected AE signal dataset from the RV reducer in the industrial robotic platform. The experimental results and analysis validate that the proposed HMM based RV Reducer fault detection model can reliably and accurately detect reducer faults.