Tool wear condition monitoring in drilling operations using hidden Markov models (HMMs)

Monitoring of tool wear condition for drilling is a very important economical consideration in automated manufacturing. Two techniques are proposed in this paper for the on-line identification of tool wear based on the measurement of cutting forces and power signals. These techniques use hidden Markov models (HMMs), commonly used in speech recognition. In the first method, bargraph monitoring of the HMM probabilities is used to track the progress of tool wear during the drilling operation. In the second method, sensor signals that correspond to various types of wear status, e.g., sharp, workable and dull, are classified using a multiple modeling method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Although this work focuses on on-line tool wear condition monitoring for drilling operations, the HMM monitoring techniques introduced in this paper can be applied to other cutting processes. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.