Multi-Sensor Heterogeneous Signal Fusion Transformer for Tool Wear Prediction

In tool wear monitoring, the efficient fusion of multi-source sensor signals poses significant challenges due to their inherent heterogeneous characteristics. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Sensor Multi-Domain feature fusion Transformer (MSMDT) model that achieves precise tool wear prediction through innovative feature engineering and cross-modal self-attention mechanisms. Specifically, we first develop a physics-aware feature extraction framework, where time-domain statistical features, frequency-domain energy features, and wavelet packet time-frequency features are systematically extracted for each sensor type. This approach constructs a unified feature matrix that effectively integrates the complementary characteristics of heterogeneous signals while preserving discriminative tool wear signatures. Then, a position-embedding-free Transformer architecture is constructed, which enables adaptive cross-domain feature fusion through joint global context modeling and local feature interaction analysis to predict tool wear values. Experimental results on the PHM2010 demonstrate the superior performance of MSMDT, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy.