Inductive displacement sensor for force measuring in humanoid robotic application: Testing the invariance on angular displacement

Abstract

A planar displacement inductive sensor, usable in robotics, is presented in the paper. The sensor is composed of two sensor elements. The first sensor element detects vertical displacement while the second sensor element detects horizontal displacement. Combining information from these two sensor elements, it is possible to determine displacement in a plane. Sensor element is a pair of meander coils. One coil is a fixed coil and has the input while the other coil is shortcircuited and moves in x-z plane. The variation of input inductance between coils serves as a measure of displacement. The goal of this paper is to show that the variation of the input inductance is invariant to angular displacement of a moving coil, which is important for implementation of the sensor in humanoid robot's foot. Calculated results were obtained using a new simulation tool developed in MATLAB. © 2009 IEEE.