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Re: Vibration sensing for early bearing failure detection - anyone doing this?

Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2026 5:54 am
by james15
@rossi30 Small correction on one detail: SLAM in a working warehouse is harder than in a controlled lab mainly because the map keeps changing - pallets move, people walk through, lighting shifts near dock doors - so a lot of production systems lean on semi-static maps refreshed periodically rather than pure continuous SLAM. Vibration is one of the most underrated sources of noisy IMU and tactile readings - mounting matters as much as sensor quality, and a poorly isolated mount can add more noise than the sensor's own datasheet specs would suggest.

Re: Vibration sensing for early bearing failure detection - anyone doing this?

Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2026 11:42 am
by sarahbernard
I'd push back on this a bit. Tactile skin arrays have improved a lot, but 'good enough to matter' really depends on the task - coarse contact detection across a large area is fairly mature, while fine, high-resolution force distribution sensing (like a human fingertip) is still the harder problem.

Re: Vibration sensing for early bearing failure detection - anyone doing this?

Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2026 2:34 pm
by garcia51
Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit. Estimating joint torque from motor current draw is cheap and requires no extra sensor, but it's less accurate than a dedicated torque sensor because it doesn't capture friction losses through the gearbox - good enough for coarse control, not always for precise force-controlled tasks. Event cameras (which report per-pixel brightness changes rather than full frames) are still more of a research curiosity than a production sensor for humanoids, mainly because the software ecosystem and processing pipelines around them are far less mature than for standard frame-based cameras.