Optimization of incremental optical encoder pulse processing

Incremental optical encoder is one of the commonly used transducer, used for angular velocity and position estimation. Unfortunately both period and frequency counting methods that are frequently employed for angular velocity estimation, using incremental optical encoder signals are affected by the quantization errors. This paper proposes a Simulink based method, to estimate the angular velocity of a moving system with minimized quantization error inherent in the conventional period counting technique. This is done through frequency division of encoder pulses. The algorithm model is integrated with the Simulink model of incremental encoder for performance evaluation. Accuracy and Percentage error for different ranges of angular velocity is studied, for both conventional period counting and proposed method.