A novel capacitive type torque sensor for robotic applications

Abstract

This paper presents a novel capacitive type joint torque sensor for robotic applications. The proposed torque sensor enables to measure the rotational torque value while it decouples the external Force/Torque loads without any complicated computing procedure. To measure the joint torque, just two capacitive transducer cells are used. These two cells are located in the opposite sides of each other, which compensates the cross couplings of the torques when external Force/Torque loads are applied. To simply the manufacturing process, the proposed sensor is designed to be composed of three plate-shaped parts and a single printed circuit board (PCB). Lastly, the developed torque sensor is manufactured and its performances are experimentally demonstrated.