A new subdivision method for grating-based displacement sensor using imaging array

A new subdivision method for grating-based displacement sensor was proposed in the present study, which takes advantages of imaging array's high resolution and pixels’ good uniformity in the space. In this method, the magnified grating image is received by imaging array and grating pitch is directly subdivided by pixels, which is quite different from that moiré fringe is subdivided by complex subsequent circuits in moiré-type displacement sensor. The displacement is statistically calculated by using the whole grating image, which greatly eliminates the errors arising from illumination, electrical signals’ fluctuation, grating defect, and so on. Therefore, the subdivision method is easy to obtain signal with high signal-to-noise ratio, insensitive to some external factors, and able to attain high measurement precision with low cost. In this paper, the principle of subdivision method was illuminated, the systemic resolution was theoretically discussed, the measurement precision was experimentally checked, and the uncertainty of measurement was analyzed. The subdivision system consisted of the grating with 20-μm pitch and the CMOS image sensor with the pixels of 1280×1024 had the resolution of 0.04 μm, and the maximum displacement error was less than 0.4 μm, which has been tested in the Abbe comparator platform.