Development and calibration of an air-floating six-axis force measurement platform using self-calibration

Abstract

This paper describes the design, working principle, as well as calibration of an air-floating six-axis force measurement platform, where the floating plate and nozzles were connected without contact, preventing inter-dimensional coupling and increasing precision significantly. The measurement repeatability error of the force size in the platform is less than 0.2% full scale (FS), which is significantly better than the precision of 1% FS in the six-axis force sensors on the current market. We overcame the difficulties of weight loading device in high-precision calibration by proposing a self-calibration method based on the floating plate gravity and met the calibration precision requirement of 0.02% FS. This study has general implications for the development and calibration of high-precision multi-axis force sensors. In particular, the air-floating six-axis force measurement platform could be applied to the calibration of some special sensors such as flexible tactile sensors and may be used as a micro-nano mechanical assembly platform for real-time assembly force testing.

Research on a non-linear calibration method for dynamometer

“…The dynamometer, which is usually applied to measure dynamic force signals in complicated working conditions (Lu et al, 2017;Hanif et al, 2019), is the core instrument in the field of manufacturing and aerospace test. However, due to existing system error, external disturbances and other issues in the test system, the relationship between measured force and output signal of dynamometer embraces nonlinearity (Huang et al, 2016;Xiaoyu et al, 2019), which can reduce the measurement accuracy of test system. And especially, there exists extremely strong nonlinearity in the load-sharing measurement system (Liu, 2016), since the stiffness and height of both load-sharing structure and sensors are different along axial loading direction (e.g.…”