Implementation of nonintrusive monitoring and fault diagnosis in industrial robot system

Monitoring and fault diagnosis systems are vital for industrial robot systems for better awareness of system status and shortening the down time. In many cases, the monitoring systems are not upgraded after the robot first installation, because the modifications could cause undesired disturbance for the production. However, for better monitoring and diagnostics rich information is essential that typically requires additional sensors and modifications to the robot system. This paper proposes a monitoring system that is possible to add-on to existing industrial robot system without any changes into the existing control and safety system. The statuses of all safety guard components are indirectly collected by optical sensors to ensure that safety aspects are maintained. The energy consumptions of the main components are monitored with energy analyser and nonintrusive current transformers. The proposed system also uses wireless technology for simplifying the installation. The main benefits of proposed solution are rapid deployment, easy scalability and enhanced fault diagnosis of the main components of the system.