Experimental Approach on Artificial Active Antenna

This paper discusses an artificial Active Antenna that can detect the contact location between an insensitive flexible beam and a 3D environment through the measurement of the rotational compliance of the beam in contact with the environment. The lateral slip, which possibly occurs for the 3D Active Antenna, overestimates the rotational compliance, and as a result, brings a large sensing error for the localizing contact point. The goal of this paper is to find the contact point under such conditions. In the first step, we push the antenna to the environment. If a lateral slip is confirmed, the pushing direction is changed continuously until we finally avoid the development of any lateral slip. We explore how to detect a lateral slip and how to determine the new pushing direction to avoid it. We experimentally verify an algorithm which can search the contact distance, even under the appearance of a lateral slip during the first step.

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