MFAFENet: A Multi-Sensor Collaborative and Multi-Scale Feature Information Adaptive Fusion Network for Spindle Rotational Error Classification in CNC Machine Tools

Abstract

Accurate classification of spindle rotational errors is critical for ensuring machining precision and operational reliability of CNC machine tools. However, existing methods face challenges in extracting discriminative feature information from vibration signals due to small inter-class differences and complex electromechanical interference. This paper proposes a novel deep learning model, MFAFENet, based on multi-sensor collaboration and multi-scale feature information adaptive fusion. Vibration signals from three mounting positions are transformed into time-frequency information representations via Short-time Fourier Transform. The proposed network adaptively fuses multi-scale feature information from parallel branches with different kernel sizes through a branch attention mechanism. An efficient channel attention module is then incorporated to recalibrate channel-wise feature responses. The cross-entropy loss function is employed to optimize the network parameters during training. Experiments on a spindle reliability test bench demonstrate that MFAFENet achieves 93.37% average test accuracy, outperforming other comparative methods. Ablation and comparative studies confirm the effectiveness of each module and the clear advantage of adaptive fusion over fixed-weight multi-scale methods. Multi-sensor fusion further improves accuracy by 7.23% over the best single-sensor setup. The proposed method establishes an effective end-to-end mapping between vibration signals and rotational errors, providing a promising solution for high-precision spindle condition monitoring.