A method for health indicator evaluation for condition monitoring of industrial robot gears

Condition monitoring of industrial robots has the potential to decrease downtimes in highly automated production systems. In this context, we propose a new method to evaluate health indicators for this application and suggest a new health indicator (HI) based on vibration data measurements, Short-time Fourier transform and Z-scores. By executing the method, we find that the proposed health indicator can detect varying faults better, has lower temperature sensitivity and works better in instationary velocity regimes compared to several state-of-the-art HIs. A discussion of the validity of the results concludes our contribution.