A Fiber-Optics-Based Body Contact Sensor for a Flexible Manipulator

This paper presents a fiber-optic-based contact sensor for the body contact sensing of a flexible manipulator. The developed sensor is capable of providing both the magnitude of applied force and the contact location. A mathematical model of this sensor is developed. A sensor prototype is created and tested to illustrate the sensing principle of the proposed sensor. Sensor design and the fabrication procedure are presented. The developed sensor has a simple structure and is capable of working in high-electromagnetic interference environments. The sensor's performance has been experimentally evaluated. Test results show that the proposed sensor has an accuracy of 83.50% for the force magnitude measurement and an average error of 10.23° for the contact angle measurement.