Low-cost and Small-sample Fault Diagnosis for 3D Printers Based on Echo State Networks

With the 3D printing rapidly expanding into various fields, 3D printers, as the equipment, should adopt a low-cost and small-sample fault diagnosis methods. A fault diagnosis method based on echo state networks (ESN) for 3D printers is proposed in this paper. A low-cost attitude sensor installed on the 3D printer is employed to collect raw fault data. Subsequently, feature extraction is carried out on the raw fault data. Using these features, ESN, as a shallow learning network, is modeled to diagnose faults of 3D printers. Experimental results show that the fault diagnosis method based on ESN still effective for 3D printers in low-cost and small-sample, which can make the fault recognition accuracy of 3D printer reach to 97.26%. Furthermore, contrast results indicated that the fault diagnosis accuracy of ESN is higher and most stable when compare with support vector machine (SVM), locality preserving projection support vector machine (LPPSVM) and principal component analysis support vector machine (PCASVM).