A novel approach of multisensory fusion to collaborative fault diagnosis in maintenance

Abstract Collaborative fault diagnosis can be facilitated by multisensory fusion technologies, as these can give more reliable results with a more complete data set. Although deep learning approaches have been developed to overcome the problem of relying on subjective experience in conventional fault diagnosis, there are two remaining obstacles to collaborative efficiency: integration of multisensory data and fusion of maintenance strategies. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a novel two-part approach: a stacked wavelet auto-encoder structure with a Morlet wavelet function for multisensory data fusion and a flexible weighted assignment of fusion strategies. Taking a planetary gearbox as an example, we use noisy vibration signals from multisensors to test the diagnosis performance of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that it can provide more accurate and reliable fault diagnosis results than other approaches.