Twin diagnostic method for industrial robot maintenance

Efficient system diagnostics has paramount significance in avoiding financial losses due to unexpected outages that may be caused by failures and/or damages. Proper maintenance strategies therefore need reliable technologies for observing erroneous operation and forecasting the potential consequences. With the exception of deliberate applications as braking etc. energy dissipation is undesired phenomenon in the operation of mechatronic devices. As a consequence, they are designed with the intent of minimizing dissipation as much as possible. The presence of intensive dissipation i.e. warming of various components normally conveys information on erroneous operation that may be caused by either mechanical or electrical components, or both. Combined application of thermometry and vibration analysis can effectively reveal the actual problem behind the symptoms and provides the users with good forecast. This method can be realized with relatively simple measuring apparatus. In the paper the details of this methodology are presented.