Active antenna for contact sensing

Abstract

This paper proposes a new active sensor system (active antenna) that can detect not only the contact location between an insensitive flexible beam and an environment but also the information of the environment's surface where the beam makes contact. The active antenna is simply composed of a flexible beam, actuators to move the beam, position sensors to measure the rotational angle of the beam, and a moment sensor. We first show that the contact distance under no lateral slip is proportional to the rotational compliance that the beam can sense at the rotational center. The lateral slip, which possibly occurs according to the pushing direction and the environment's geometry, overestimates the rotational compliance, and as a result, brings a large sensing error for the localizing contact point. The goal of this paper is to find the contact location under such conditions. We explore how to detect a lateral slip and how to determine the new pushing direction to avoid it. We show an algorithm that can search for the pushing direction which can avoid any lateral slip. The convergence of this algorithm is shown and a practical utilization of this algorithm is also discussed with a trade-off between the number of trials and the sensing accuracy.