Development of a biomimetic position sensor for robotic kinaesthesia

Abstract

This paper presents a biomimetic sensor for transducing displacements. Our sensor is a robotic analog of the biological muscle spindle, an actuated position sensor which transduces muscle displacement for kinaesthetic awareness. The mechanical filter exhibits the desired step response. The transducer possesses the desired linear response with a sensitivity of 34nm/Hz. Finally, the encoder circuitry successfully maps the millivolt output to a pulse frequency range of 1150 Hz to 12.5 kHz. Results from an integrated system test show that the sensor can successfully detect errors in trajectory tracking introduced by both phase lag and perturbations. By physically realizing the hypothesized core features of a biological muscle spindle in engineering hardware, we evoked the type of actuated sensor output seen in the biological muscle spindle, a widely utilized tool of biological motor control.