Abstract
Joint anomaly detection from multi-joint signals is a key component in maintaining motion-control quality in industrial robots. In practical applications, this task requires models that achieve strong detection performance while remaining lightweight. However, existing methods often struggle to achieve a satisfactory balance between these two objectives. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Joint-aware Multi-Scale Attention Network (JMSANet), a lightweight architecture for joint-level anomaly detection. Specifically, JMSANet includes: (1) a joint position encoding (JPE) front-end that embeds joint identity into the stacked multi-joint input and performs pointwise projection to reduce inter-joint feature confusion; (2) a lightweight joint-aware hierarchical downsampling (LJHD) backbone built upon depthwise separable lightweight convolution blocks, which extracts multi-scale temporal representations via stage-wise downsampling with a compact footprint; and (3) a multi-scale aggregation (MSA) head that fuses multi-scale features through a lightweight multi-scale attention mechanism over global average pooling, enabling lightweight cross-scale integration. Experimental results on in-situ vibration data collected from an industrial robot show that JMSANet achieves competitive Macro-Precision, Macro-Recall, and Macro-F1 while maintaining a lightweight model footprint. Sensitivity analysis and ablation studies further verify the contributions of JPE, the hierarchical backbone, and the MSA head, supporting the effectiveness of the proposed design for the lightweight industrial robot anomaly detection task. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Nashizumi45/JMSANet-A-Lightweight-Network-for-Industrial-Robot-Multi-Joint-Anomaly-Detection.
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