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In recent years, multi-axis robots are indispensable in automated factories due to the rapid development of Industry 4.0. Many related processes were required to have the increasing demand for accuracy, reproducibility, and abnormal detection. The monitoring function and immediate feedback for correction is more and more important. This present study integrated a highly sensitive lithium niobate (LiNbO3) vibration sensor as a sensor node (SN) and architecture of wireless mesh network (WMN) to develop a monitoring system (MS) for the robotic arm. The advantages of the thin-film LiNbO3 piezoelectric sensor were low-cost, high-sensitivity and good electrical compatibility. The experimental results obtained from the vibration platform show that the sensitivity achieved 50 mV/g and the reaction time within 1 ms. The results of on-site testing indicated that the SN could be configured on the relevant equipment quickly and detect the abnormal vibration in specific equipment effectively. Each SN could be used more than 10 h at the 80 Hz transmission rate under WMN architecture and the loss rate of transmission was less than 0.01% within 20 m.

It is a great challenge to detect in-situ high-frequency vibration signals for extreme environment applications. A highly sensitive and robust vibration sensor is desired. Among the many piezoelectric materials, single-crystal lithium niobate (LiNbO3) could be a good candidate to meet the demand. In this work, a novel type of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) vibration sensor based on a single crystalline LiNbO3 thin film is demonstrated. Firstly, the four-cantilever-beam MEMS vibration sensor was designed and optimized with the parametric method. The structural dependence on the intrinsic frequency and maximum stress was obtained. Then, the vibration sensor was fabricated using standard MEMS processes. The practical intrinsic frequency of the as-presented vibration sensor was 5.175 kHz, which was close to the calculated and simulated frequency. The dynamic performance of the vibration sensor was tested on a vibration platform after the packaging of the printed circuit board. The effect of acceleration was investigated, and it was observed that the output charge was proportional to the amplitude of the acceleration. As the loading acceleration amplitude is 10 g and the frequency is in the range of 20 to 2400 Hz, the output charge amplitude basically remains stable for the frequency range from 100 Hz to 1400 Hz, but there is a dramatic decrease around 1400 to 2200 Hz, and then it increases significantly. This should be attributed to the significant variation of the damping coefficient near 1800 Hz. Meanwhile, the effect of the temperature on the output was studied. The results show the nearly linear dependence of the output charge on the temperature. The presented MEMS vibration sensors were endowed with a high output performance, linear dependence and stable sensitivity, and could find potential applications for the detection of wide-band high-frequency vibration.