A Study on the Failure Diagnosis of Transfer Robot for Semiconductor Automation Based on Machine Learning Algorithm

In manufacturing and semiconductor industries, transfer robots increase productivity through accurate and continuous work. Due to the nature of the semiconductor process, there are environments where humans cannot intervene to maintain internal temperature and humidity in a clean room. So, transport robots take responsibility over humans. In such an environment where the manpower of the process is cutting down, the lack of maintenance and management technology of the machine may adversely affect the production, and that's why it is necessary to develop a technology for the machine failure diagnosis system. Therefore, this paper tries to identify various causes of failure of transport robots that are widely used in semiconductor automation, and the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) method is considered for determining and predicting the process of failures. The robot mainly fails in the driving unit due to long-term repetitive motion, and the core components of the driving unit are motors and gear reducer. A simulation drive unit was manufactured and tested around this component and then applied to 6-axis vertical multi-joint robots used in actual industrial sites. Vibration data was collected for each cause of failure of the robot, and then the collected data was processed through signal processing and frequency analysis. The processed data can determine the fault of the robot by utilizing machine learning algorithms such as SVM (Support Vector Machine) and KNN (K-Nearest Neighbor). As a result, the PHM environment was built based on machine learning algorithms using SVM and KNN, confirming that failure prediction was partially possible.

머신러닝 알고리즘 기반 반도체 자동화를 위한 이송로봇 고장진단에 대한 연구