This study presents a novel method for damage detection and identification in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using vibration data gathering and processing technologies based on deep learning. To conduct the study, a quad-rotor UAV was manufactured, and a vibration data acquisition system was developed to collect vibration data along three axes under normal and three damage scenarios. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) was employed to reduce high-frequency noise in the signals, and the root mean square error (RMSE) feature was utilised to select the Y-axis acceleration data, which exhibits significant changes across different damage cases. Finally, a convolutional neural network was used to identify the damage based on the vibration data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved 97.5 accuracy using selected and noise-reduced Y-axis acceleration data, thereby indicating its usefulness in diagnosing damage types in multi-rotor UAVs. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.