Condition-Adaptive Hybrid Anomaly Detection for Machine-Tending Applications
Francesco Aggogeri, Nicola PellegriniRetrofit condition monitoring of industrial manipulators should distinguish actual mechanical anomalies from signal changes produced by payload, speed, program phase, and transient motion. This study presents a hybrid detector for a six-axis machine-tending robot using a forearm-mounted inertial measurement unit and an auditable two-stage decision architecture. Engineered descriptors support two branches: a Random Forest estimates similarity to reviewed abnormal patterns, while a PCA representation measures context-compatible geometric novelty. The branch scores are combined via a linear fusion coefficient selected on grouped validation runs. Operating context selects a pre-validated, controlled context-compatible PCA reference and modifies the final decision through a bounded threshold correction; it does not update the nominal model online. An H-of-K persistence rule converts repeated window-level exceedances into event-level maintenance evidence. All data-dependent transformations are fitted after complete physical acquisition runs have been assigned to training, validation, or held-out testing. In the run-grouped archive, the complete adaptive hybrid achieved 97.1 ± 0.8% accuracy and an F1-score of 0.96 ± 0.01 across 18 held-out runs. The resulting framework prioritizes leakage-controlled validation, constrained adaptation, and computationally modest retrofit deployment; further developments will enable online adaptation.