A novel piezoelectric 6-component heavy force/moment sensor for huge heavy-load manipulator's gripper

This paper presents the development of a piezoelectric 6-component heavy force/moment sensor which may be used to detect forces Fx, Fy and Fz, and moments Mx, My and Mz on huge heavy-load manipulator's gripper, simultaneously. The structure of the sensor is newly modeled. Piezoelectric quartz is chosen as force sensing element to realize real-time measurement. In order to investigate the validity of the proposed method, a prototype of piezoelectric 6-component heavy force/moment sensor is developed, and a characteristic test of the piezoelectric 6-component heavy force/moment sensor is performed. The experiments show that the linearity of the sensor is no more than 1%, and the interference errors are less than 3%. The carrying capability of force sensor is improved greatly by using load distribution.