Angular acceleration measurement: a review

This paper gives a review of sensors, methods, and algorithms available for the measurement of angular acceleration. The emphasis is in delay-sensitive real-time applications. Although the angular acceleration can be measured indirectly using either a rotating angle sensor or a velocity sensor, the noise-amplification problem related to the differentiation process has motivated the efforts to develop transducers for direct sensing of angular acceleration. Direct measuring of linear acceleration is in wide everyday use, but the angular acceleration sensors, particularly those with unlimited rotation angle, can still be considered as emerging devices. Consequently, there exist two principal challenges for the research and development community: to develop economical and accurate angular accelerometers with unlimited rotation range and to create wideband indirect techniques with small lag and high signal-to-error ratio.