In highly automated machining centers, intelligent sensor fddeback systems are indispensable on order to monitor their operations, to ensure efficient metal removal, and to initate remedial action in the event of accident. In this study, an on-line tool wear detection system for thrning operations is developed, and experimentally evaluated. The system employs multiple sensors and the signals from these sensors are processed using a multichannel autoegressive (AR) series model. The resulting output from the signal processing block is then fed to a previously tranied artificial neural network (multiayered perceptron) to make a final decision on the state of the cutting tool. To learn the necessary input/output mapping for tool wear detection, the weithts and thresholds of the network are adjusted according to the back propagation (BP) method during off-line training. The results of experimental evaluation show that the system works well over a wide range of cutting conditions, and the ability of the system to detect tool wear is improved due to the generalization, fault-tolearant and self-ofganizing properties of the neural network.