Instituto de Investigaciones Energéticas y Aplicaciones Industriales, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain.
Robotics, Vision and Control Group, Universidad de Sevilla, 41092 Sevilla, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Mar 5;21(5):1808. doi: 10.3390/s21051808.
The design and application of sensing antenna devices that mimic insect antennae or mammal whiskers is an active field of research. However, these devices still require new developments if they are to become efficient and reliable components of robotic systems. We, therefore, develop and build a prototype composed of a flexible beam, two servomotors that drive the beam and a load cell sensor that measures the forces and torques at the base of the flexible beam. This work reports new results in the area of the signal processing of these devices. These results will make it possible to estimate the point at which the flexible antenna comes into contact with an object (or obstacle) more accurately than has occurred with previous algorithms. Previous research reported that the estimation of the fundamental natural frequency of vibration of the antenna using dynamic information is not sufficient as regards determining the contact point and that the estimation of the contact point using static information provided by the forces and torques measured by the load cell sensor is not very accurate. We consequently propose an algorithm based on the fusion of the information provided by the two aforementioned strategies that enhances the separate benefits of each one. We demonstrate that the adequate combination of these two pieces of information yields an accurate estimation of the contacted point of the antenna link. This will enhance the precision of the estimation of points on the surface of the object that is being recognized by the antenna. Thorough experimentation is carried out in order to show the features of the proposed algorithm and establish its range of application.
模仿昆虫触角或哺乳动物触须设计和应用感应天线装置是一个活跃的研究领域。然而，如果这些装置要成为机器人系统的高效和可靠组件，它们仍需要新的发展。因此，我们开发并构建了一个由柔性梁、两个驱动梁的伺服电机和一个测量柔性梁底部力和扭矩的称重传感器组成的原型。这项工作报告了这些设备信号处理领域的新结果。这些结果将使我们能够比以前的算法更准确地估计柔性天线与物体（或障碍物）接触的点。以前的研究报告称，使用动态信息估计天线的基本固有振动频率不足以确定接触点，而使用由称重传感器测量的力和扭矩提供的静态信息估计接触点并不十分准确。因此，我们提出了一种基于融合上述两种策略提供的信息的算法，该算法增强了每种策略的单独优势。我们证明了这两种信息的适当组合可以准确估计天线连接的接触点。这将提高天线识别的物体表面上的点的估计精度。为了展示所提出算法的特点并确定其应用范围，进行了彻底的实验。
