Improved Drill State Recognition during Milling Process Using Artificial Intelligence

In this article, an automated method for tool condition monitoring is presented. When producing items in large quantities, pointing out the exact time when the element needs to be exchanged is crucial. If performed too early, the operator gets rid of a good drill, also resulting in production downtime increase if this operation is repeated too often. On the other hand, continuing production with a worn tool might result in a poor-quality product and financial loss for the manufacturer. In the presented approach, drill wear is classified using three states representing decreasing quality: green, yellow and red. A series of signals were collected as training data for the classification algorithms. Measurements were saved in separate data sets with corresponding time windows. A total of ten methods were evaluated in terms of overall accuracy and the number of misclassification errors. Three solutions obtained an acceptable accuracy rate above 85%. Algorithms were able to assign states without the most undesirable red-green and green-red errors. The best results were achieved by the Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithm. This approach achieved an overall accuracy of 93.33%, and the only misclassification was the yellow sample assigned as green. The presented solution achieves good results and can be applied in industry applications related to tool condition monitoring.