Rotating machinery plays an important role in transportation, petrochemical industry, industrial production, national defence equipment, and other fields. With the development of artificial intelligence, the equipment condition monitoring especially needs an intelligent fault identification method to solve the problem of high false alarm rate under complex working conditions. At present, intelligent recognition models mostly increase the complexity of the network to achieve the purpose of high recognition rate. This method often needs better hardware support and increases the operation time. Therefore, this paper proposes an adaptive convolutional neural network (ACNN) by combining ensemble learning and simple convolutional neural network (CNN). ACNN model consists of input layer, subnetwork unit, fusion unit, and output layer. The input of the model is one-dimensional (1D) vibration signal sample, and the subnetwork unit consists of several simple CNNs, and the fusion unit weights the output of the subnetwork units through the weight matrix. ACNN recognizes the self-adaptive of weight factors through the fusion unit. The adaptive performance and robustness of ACNN for sample recognition under variable working conditions are verified by gear and bearing experiments.