FPGA-based wideband force sensing with Kalman-filter-based disturbance observer

Haptic technology has been attracting widespread attention in the fields of robotics and medicine. The bandwidth of force sensing is vital to reproduce the vivid force sensation. This paper proposes a method to enlarge the bandwidth of force sensing. In this paper, the force sensing operation is constructed by a combination of a Kalman-filter and a disturbance observer for multi-sensor. In order to achieve the high sampling rate, the control algorithm together with the force estimation function is implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The wide bandwidth of force sensing is obtained owing to the shortened sampling period by FPGA and the noise suppression by Kalman-filter. The experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.