An Analog Computer for a 6-axes Force-Torque Sensor

A transducer's outputs in any typical sensor needs certain computations before meaningful information is extracted from it. The digitization of these signals for transmitting it to a computer for the required computation may cause significant quantization errors as well as the delay. We found that an analog computer can be the ideal solution for processing a force-torque sensor's signals. It is perfect for the situations where the sensor is used as a feedback device in a closed loop control system where a delay in the processed feedback signal may make the system unstable. We present here an OPAMP based analog computer that processes six low level (millivolts) signals by multiplying it with a Jacobian matrix without converting it to digital data.