Plastic micro-drive systems are used in an increasing number of applications in manufacturing industries. The operational status of the plastic micro-drive system directly affects the performance of the host system. However, the fault diagnosis of the plastic micro-drive system remains a challenge due to its miniaturization. In this paper, a fault-detection study using the electrical-parameter analysis method is proposed for the grille controller, which provides a basis for typical plastic micro-drive systems. The structure and working principle of grille controllers are analyzed, and typical faults are summarized. Then, the fault-mechanism analysis of typical faults is presented, and the identification indicators of faults are developed. A strategy of fault-feature frequency extraction based on the improved reconstruction method of empirical-mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed. Finally, the experimental results reveal that the proposed indicators and method demonstrate high accuracy for the grille-controller fault detection.
