Tool wear is inevitable in manufacturing and affects the surface quality and geometric tolerance significantly. A robust and efficient tool condition monitoring (TCM) system is needed to maximize tool life, ensure work-piece quality, and benefit the cost control of manufacturers. This paper presents a systematic singularity analysis approach of cutting force and vibrations for feature extraction of TCM in milling. The singularity of sensory signals is estimated by Holder Exponents (HE), which are determined by wavelet transform modulus maxima (WTMM). A comprehensive wavelet basis selection approach is proposed to choose the appropriate wavelet basis for different sensory signals. A de-noising algorithm based on WTMMs’ estimation was used as a pre-processing technique to improve noise reduction and preserve the singularities. The mutual information method was employed to rank HE features. The effectiveness of the singularity analysis approach is validated through the Support Vector Machine (SVM) models trained by these ranked features. The estimating results of case studies confirm the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed approach.

In light of the prevalent issues concerning the mechanical grading of fresh tea leaves, characterized by high damage rates and poor accuracy, as well as the limited grading precision through the integration of machine vision and machine learning (ML) algorithms, this study presents an innovative approach for classifying the quality grade of fresh tea leaves. This approach leverages an integration of image recognition and deep learning (DL) algorithm to accurately classify tea leaves’ grades by identifying distinct bud and leaf combinations. The method begins by acquiring separate images of orderly scattered and randomly stacked fresh tea leaves. These images undergo data augmentation techniques, such as rotation, flipping, and contrast adjustment, to form the scattered and stacked tea leaves datasets. Subsequently, the YOLOv8x model was enhanced by Space pyramid pooling improvements (SPPCSPC) and the concentration-based attention module (CBAM). The established YOLOv8x-SPPCSPC-CBAM model is evaluated by comparing it with popular DL models, including Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5x, and YOLOv8x. The experimental findings reveal that the YOLOv8x-SPPCSPC-CBAM model delivers the most impressive results. For the scattered tea leaves, the mean average precision, precision, recall, and number of images processed per second rates of 98.2%, 95.8%, 96.7%, and 2.77, respectively, while for stacked tea leaves, they are 99.1%, 99.1%, 97.7% and 2.35, respectively. This study provides a robust framework for accurately classifying the quality grade of fresh tea leaves.

The gradual tool wear is unavoidable in the machining process, it directly influences the surface integrity and dimensional tolerances of the components. The tool condition monitoring (TCM) systems have the capacity to make full use of the cutting potential of the cutting tools, which is of great significance for improving production efficiency and ensuring product quality. In milling titanium alloys, tool tipping is one of the main failure modes. Therefore, this study focuses on establishing a tool tipping monitoring approach for the milling process. The singularity analysis method based on wavelet transform was employed to characterize the variation of vibration waveforms quantitatively with the Holder Exponent (HE) index. The probability density distribution and statistical analysis were adopted to extract effective HE features from the HE indexes to correlate with the different tool conditions. The mutual information method was adopted to rank the discriminability of the HE statistical parameters. Then, several machine learning (ML) models were established with the screened HE features. Finally, the results of the experiments indicate that the Support Vector Machine (SVM) model has the highest classification accuracy and can provide practical guides on the tool changes.

In order to achieve precise discrimination of leaf diseases in the Maize/Soybean intercropping system, i.e. leaf spot disease, rust disease, mixed leaf diseases, this study utilized hyperspectral imaging and deep learning algorithms for the classification of diseased leaves of maize and soybean. In the experiments, hyperspectral imaging equipment was used to collect hyperspectral images of leaves, and the regions of interest were extracted within the spectral range of 400 to 1000 nm. These regions included one or more infected areas on the leaves to obtain hyperspectral data. This approach aimed to enhance the accurate discrimination of different types of diseases, providing more effective technical support for the detection and control of crop diseases. The preprocessing of hyperspectral data involved four methods: Savitzky-Golay (SG), Standard Normal Variate (SNV), Multiplicative Scatter Correction (MSC) and 1st Derivative (1st Der). The 1st Der was found to be the optimal preprocessing method for hyperspectral data of maize and soybean diseases. Competitive Adaptive Reweighted Sampling (CARS), Successive Projections Algorithm (SPA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were employed for feature extraction on the optimal preprocessed data. The Support Vector Machines (SVM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (BiLSTM) and Dung Beetle Optimization-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (DBO-BiLSTM) were established for the discrimination of maize and soybean diseases. Comparative analysis indicated that, in the classification of maize and soybean diseases, the DBO-BiLSTM model based on the CARS extraction method (1st Der-CARS-DBO-BiLSTM) demonstrated the highest classification rate, reaching 98.7% on the test set. The research findings suggest that integrating hyperspectral imaging with both traditional and deep learning methods is a viable and effective approach for classifying diseases in the intercropping model of maize and soybean. These results offer a novel method and a theoretical foundation for the non-invasive, precise, and efficient identification of diseases in the intercropping model of maize and soybean, carrying positive implications for agricultural production.

Reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) point cloud model of maize plants can provide reliable data for its growth observation and agricultural machinery research. The existing data collection systems and registration methods have low collection efficiency and poor registration accuracy. A point cloud registration method for maize plants based on conical surface fitting—iterative closest point (ICP) with automatic point cloud collection platform was proposed in this paper. Firstly, a Kinect V2 was selected to cooperate with an automatic point cloud collection platform to collect multi-angle point clouds. Then, the conical surface fitting algorithm was employed to fit the point clouds of the flowerpot wall to acquire the fitted rotation axis for coarse registration. Finally, the interval ICP registration algorithm was used for precise registration, and the Delaunay triangle meshing algorithm was chosen to triangulate the point clouds of maize plants. The maize plant at the flowering and kernel stage was selected for reconstruction experiments, the results show that: the full-angle registration takes 57.32 s, and the registration mean distance error is 1.98 mm. The measured value’s relative errors between the reconstructed model and the material object of maize plant are controlled within 5%, the reconstructed model can replace maize plants for research.

A physics–data fusion model for tool wear prediction, termed PI-ATBiLSTM, was proposed in the present study to address the limitations of conventional purely data-driven approaches, which do not readily incorporate physical knowledge of the cutting process and depend heavily on large quantities of labelled data. A bidirectional long short-term memory network was integrated with an attention mechanism to capture temporal dependencies and critical wear-related features from the monitoring data obtained from nine identical cutting tools. In addition, a physics-consistent loss function was introduced to embed constraints governing wear evolution into the training process, thereby improving the physical consistency of the predicted wear trajectories. The experimental results showed that, compared with the conventional data-driven model, PI-ATBiLSTM reduced the average root mean square error, mean absolute error and mean absolute percentage error by 60.92%, 60.83% and 62.50%, respectively. Robust predictive performance was maintained under different cutting conditions. The model was further validated on the publicly available PHM2010 dataset, achieving average root mean square error, mean absolute error and mean absolute percentage error values of 1.88 μm, 1.42 μm and 0.014, respectively. Overall, the proposed framework provides an accurate and robust physics–data fusion approach to tool wear prediction for intelligent manufacturing applications.