Self-mixing interferometry for rotational speed measurement of servo drives

Self-mixing interferometry (SMI) is an efficient technique applied to measure distance, velocity, displacement, and vibration. In this work, a compact and low cost SMI is applied to measure the rotational speed of a servo drive up to 6000 RPM. The application of SMI to rotational speed measurement of servo drives instead of the usage of incremental encoders is proposed. The Doppler frequency is obtained via analysis on the power spectral density, which is estimated by the smoothing periodogram method based on the fast Fourier transformation. The signals are processed in MATLAB and LABVIEW, showing that the SMI can be applied to dynamic rotational speed measurement of servo drives. Results of experiments demonstrate that this system is implementable for rotational speed measurement over the whole range from 3 RPM to 6000 RPM. In addition, the system used to measure rotational speed can also accurately record changes in position without integrating the velocity.