Signal Processing Optimization in Resource-Limited IoT for Fault Prediction in Rotating Machinery

Abstract

Traditional fault detection methods, often designed for centralized or cloud-based systems, are ill-suited for the edge. The deployment of predictive maintenance solutions on ultra-low-cost embedded platforms remains a significant challenge due to strict limitations in memory, processing capacity, and energy availability. To address these challenges, vibration and motor current signals were analyzed using an ultra-low-cost RP2040 microcontroller. For fault detection, this study uses statistical time-domain features and principal component analysis (PCA), followed by classification with eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models distilled for resource-constrained deployment. Experimental evaluation demonstrated that vibration-based features achieved a diagnostic accuracy of 94.1%, while current-based representations obtained 95.5% accuracy when using principal components, compared to 83.2% with handcrafted statistical features. Model distillation reduced memory footprint by up to 2.5× (from 0.42 MB to 0.15 MB) without compromising diagnostic fidelity, enabling deployment within the 264 KB RAM and 2 MB Flash constraints of the RP2040 microcontroller. This study proposes a modular framework that systematically evaluates statistical features, dimensionality reduction, sensor synchronization, and model distillation, thereby identifying the most cost-efficient combination of techniques that balances diagnostic accuracy with strict memory and processing constraints. The findings establish that accurate fault detection can be realized directly on severely resource-limited hardware, thereby extending the practical applicability of condition monitoring to cost-sensitive industrial environments.