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The qualities of machined products are largely depended on the status of machines in various aspects. Thus, appropriate condition monitoring would be essential for both quality control and longevity assessment. Recently, with the advance in artificial intelligence and computational power, status monitoring and prognosis based on data driven approach becomes more practical. However, unlike machine vision and image processing, where data types are fixed and the performance index has already well defined, sensor selection and index for machine tools are versatile and not standardized at this moment. Without supporting of appropriate domain knowledge for selecting appropriate sensors and adequate performance index, pure data driven approach might suffer from unsatisfied prediction accuracy and needing of excessive training data, as well as the possibility of misjudgment. This would be a key obstacle for promoting data driven based prognosis in general intelligent manufacturing field. In this work, the status monitoring and prediction of a cutter wear problem is investigated to address the above concerns and to demonstrate the possible solutions by hiring a 5-axis machine center equipped with milling cutters of different wear levels. Transducers including accelerometers, microphones, current transformer, and acoustic emission sensors are mounted on the spindle, fixture, and nearby structures to monitor the milling process. The collected data are processed to extract various signatures and the key dominated indexes are identified. Finally, three multilayer perception (MLP) artificial neural network models are established. These models trained by different input features are compared to examine the influence of selected sensors and indexes on the prediction accuracy. The results show that with appropriate sensors and signatures, even with less amount of experimental data, the model can indeed achieve a better prediction. Therefore, a proper selection of indexes guided by physical knowledge based experiment or theoretical investigation would be critical.

In modern Industry 4.0 era, status monitoring of machine tools is an important target and vibration monitoring is a commonly used way for machine tools life assessment. However, the vibration characteristics of machine tools are usually complicated and cover a very wide spectrum. Any accelerometers will suffer from its sensitivity-bandwidth limitation and high cost. As a result, an integrated vibration sensing module is proposed here by integrating various MEMS accelerometer chips. Through structure and circuit design, the vibration sensing module is integrated as well as the disadvantage, low sensitivity, of MEMS accelerometer is overcome. Furthermore, the module is then compared to a piezoelectric accelerometer as the standard for accessing the performance. Additionally, the vibration domain knowledge is also investigated and also applied to the machine tools for examining its feasibility. In the future, with more domain knowledge, it is expected that more sophisticated model would be developed for better predicting the machine status for enhancing the manufacturing reliability.