A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Algorithms for Angular Position Estimation in Assembly Tools

Abstract: The threaded fastener is by far the most common method for securing components together and plays a significant role in determining the quality of a product. Atlas Copco offers industrial tools for tightening these fasteners, which are today suffering from errors in the applied torque. These errors have been found to behave in periodic patterns which indicate that the errors can be predicted and therefore compensated for. However, this is only possible by knowing the rotational position of the tool. Atlas Copco is interested in the possibility of acquiring this rotational position without installing sensors inside the tools. To address this challenge, the thesis explores the feasibility of estimating the rotational position by analysing the behaviour of the errors and finding periodicities in the data. The objective is to determine whether these periodicities can be used to accurately estimate the rotation of the torque errors of unknown data relative to errors of data where the rotational position is known. The tool analysed in this thesis exhibits a periodic pattern in the torque error with a period of 11 revolutions.  Two methods for estimating the rotational position were evaluated: a simple nearest neighbour method that uses mean squared error (MSE) as distance measure, and a more complex circular fully convolutional network (CFCN). The project involved data collection from a custom-built setup. However, the setup was not fully completed, and the models were therefore evaluated on a limited dataset. The results showed that the CFCN method was not able to identify the rotational position of the signal. The insufficient size of the data is discussed to be the cause for this. The nearest neighbour method, however, was able to estimate the rotational position correctly with 100% accuracy across 1000 iterations, even when looking at a fragment of a signal as small as 40%. Unfortunately, this method is computationally demanding and exhibits slow performance when applied to large datasets. Consequently, adjustments are required to enhance its practical applicability. In summary, the findings suggest that the nearest neighbour method is a promising approach for estimating the rotational position and could potentially contribute to improving the accuracy of tools.