Attitude Measurement of A Spherical Rotor Using Configurated Optical Sensors

In industrial applications, the measurement of the three-dimensional rotation angles of a spherical rotor is often encountered. For instance, a single ball is used as the wheel drive for some robots and is balanced dynamically on it, so measuring the three-dimensional rotation of the wheel is important for good balance control. A measurement and optimal configuration method based on optical sensors are introduced in this paper. Firstly, the principle of the sensing method is described in this paper. Then, the optimal solution of placing multiple sensors on the surface of the spherical rotor is given by using the principle of minimum singular value and maximum reliability to deal with the influence of the noise in the measurement process. Finally, the experiments are implemented by using the indexing plate and the turntable system to verify the measurement performance of the different configuration, which illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.