As the rotary angular sensor is important for measuring accurate positions and directions, it plays an important role in various applications such as robotic controller, camera and industrial machines.
At present, lots of angular position sensors such as simple resistive potentiometers, capacitive potentiometers, optical sensors and magnetic sensors are in use, and optical sensors which operate in visible light or infrared light offer the advantages of contactless measurement and insensitivity to electric and magnetic fields. So, an optical angular sensor has become recognized as an indispensable displacement/position sensor due to its high resolution, light weight and excellent immunity to electromagnetic interface.
Jo Myong Jin, a researcher at the Semiconductor Institute, has proposed an absolute rotary angular sensor with a nonlinear transparent disc. This rotary angular sensor is of transparent type and it has a nonlinear transparent disc between light source and LDRs. This sensor consists of five elements, that is, light source, a shaft coupled nonlinear transparent disc, a lens, a pair of light dependent resistors (LDR) and a signal processing circuit. In this sensor, absolute rotary angle is measured by output resistance of double LDRs which has a linear change by nonlinear transparency of the disc in the whole measurement range (from 0° to 360°) according to the characteristics of LDR’s resistance via irradiance. Its operation principle is similar to that of a resistive potentiometer.
The advantage of the sensor is that it is immune to shock and vibration as it has a nonlinear transparent disc instead of a binary coded disc and a large gap distance between the disc and the optical sensor. Another advantage is that as the output signal of LDRs is analogue, its resolution is determined by the A/D converter in the signal processing circuit. Therefore, this rotary angular sensor provides a high resolution in the range of 0~360°.
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