PaintPots: Low Cost, Accurate, Highly Customizable Potentiometers for Position Sensing

Tarik Tosun, Daniel Edgar, Chao Liu, Thulani Tsabedze, Mark Yim
May, 2017
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Abstract

The PaintPot manufacturing process is a new way to create low-cost, low-profile, highly customizable potentiometers for position sensing in robotic applications. It uses widely accessible materials, requires no special expertise, and creates custom potentiometers in a variety of shapes and sizes, including curved surfaces. PaintPots offer accuracy and precision performance comparable with commercial (noncustomizable) options through a calibration process that trades small computation for cost. This paper includes detailed PaintPot manufacturing and calibration processes, and experiments that validate the accuracy, precision, and lifetime performance of PaintPots, comparable to commercial sensors. We also provide a case-study application in the SMORES-EP modular robot, and show how the PaintPot process can be used to create resistive surfaces capable of sensing position in 2D on planes and spheres.

Type
Conference paper
Publication
2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Chao Liu
Chao Liu
Postdoctoral Associate

My research interests include manipulation and tactile sensing, swarm and modular robotics, soft robotics, parallel robotics, control and motion planning.