Design and development of an adjustable angle sensor based on rotary potentiometer for measuring finger flexion

Abstract

In this paper, an adjustable angle sensor based on rotary potentiometer for measuring and monitoring finger flexion is proposed. Most of the current system is unadjustable, inaccurate, costly and hard to calibrate. The proposed system in this study consists of a rotary potentiometers and adjustable case, which makes it adjustable, compact and lightweight with the ability to produce a better measurement result. As the rotary potentiometer rotated due to the motion of the finger, the joint angles are calculated by measuring the change in resistance of the rotary potentiometer. The proposed system can widely be applied for the angle measurement systems at small and complex structure surface such as finger joint, which require to measure finger flexion for developing related device such as robotic hand control system, virtual reality or teleoperation systems. The experiment study shows that the proposed system is adjustable and has better accuracy, small repeatability error and more reliable compared to the popular flex sensor.