Design and evaluation of a novel dual-channel complementary potentiometer for rotation measurement

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to develop a novel Dual-Channel Complementary (DCC) potentiometer to enhance the measurement accuracy of the conventional rotational potentiometer. Its principle is utilizing the complementary characteristic of the signals, which exist a specific phase offset, from different channels to reduce the effect of their inherent nonlinearity on measurement accuracy, and increase the measurement accuracy. A data-driven multi-channel information fusion method has been proposed to fuse the signals of the Dual-Channel Complementary (DCC) potentiometer, which could achieve data fusion and sensor nonlinearity calibration in one go. Prototype has been developed to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed DCC principle and information fusion method. Experimental results reveal that compared to the conventional rotational potentiometer, the RMS value of the measurement error of the DCC potentiometer could achieve a reduction of about 99.5%. The overall measurement performance of the DCC potentiometer could be significantly enhanced.