Accurate tool wear and breakage monitoring method for milling process based on vision and laser sensor fusion

Abstract Accurate online acquisition of tool wear degradation indicators is an important prerequisite for tool wear monitoring and tool remaining life prediction. The tool degradation process is usually accompanied by the flank face of cutting tool wear and blade breakage, however, the existing degradation indicators only consider the flank face wear value, but not the tool breakage value, resulting in the lack of accuracy of degradation indicators. To this end, an online identification method of tool degradation indicators based on the fusion of image sensors and laser displacement sensors is proposed, which adopts the VGG16-UNet network to identify the wear value in the image and obtains the tool breakage value based on the time series data of the laser displacement sensor. Finally, the tool wear and breakage degradation label containing wear and breakage values is established. Compared to manual measurements, the absolute average error is within 15 microns for cutter face damage values and within 3 microns for cutter face wear values.