A User-Friendly and Economical Six-Axis Force/Torque Sensor With Wireless Communication for Force Control and Monitoring

Six-axis force/torque (F/T) sensors have been actively developed owing to the increasing demand for force control and monitoring in many engineering applications. However, these sensors are expensive and complicated to use, particularly the wireless ones. This study presents a user-friendly and economical wireless six-axis F/T sensor for force control and monitoring applications. A newly designed elastic structure was used to overcome the reliability degradation and high machining cost problems of the elastic structures developed in our previous study. T-shaped structures were arranged symmetrically around the upper and lower parts, reducing the manufacturing cost. The electrical and electronic circuits for economical analog/digital signal processing, including zero calibration, were developed based on cheap microcontrollers. A user-friendly embedded wireless communication module was programmed at a low machine level for fast force control and monitoring. Additionally, we implemented a universal serial bus (USB)-wired F/T sensor similar to the wireless unit, except for wired communication. The effectiveness of the proposed F/T sensor was demonstrated by experimental tests and comparison with a commercial F/T sensor.