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In this article, a method of error source analysis and detection to improve the angle measurement accuracy of rotary encoders in precision measuring instruments is proposed. The angle measurement error caused by the installation eccentricity of the grating disk and the radial error motion of the rotating shaft is analyzed, and the error model is built. The method of measuring the radial error motion is introduced, and the visual system and image processing technology is proposed to detect the eccentricity. The verification experiment by the use of an autocollimator and a polygon is carried out. The residual error after comparison within ±6″ accounts for 9% of the angle measurement error. The proposed error model is verified, and the angle measurement error can be predicted if the installation eccentricity and radial error motion are known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The measurement accuracy of the precision instruments that contain rotation joints is influenced significantly by the rotary encoders that are installed in the rotation joints. Apart from the imperfect manufacturing and installation of the rotary encoder, the variations of ambient temperature could cause the angle measurement error of the rotary encoder. According to the characteristics of the 2 π periodicity of the angle measurement at the stationary temperature and the complexity of the effects of ambient temperature changes, the method based on the Fourier expansion-back propagation (BP) neural network optimized by genetic algorithm (FE-GABPNN) is proposed to improve the angle measurement accuracy of the rotary encoder. The proposed method, which innovatively integrates the characteristics of Fourier expansion, the BP neural network and genetic algorithm, has good fitting performance. The rotary encoder that is installed in the rotation joint of the articulated coordinate measuring machine (ACMM) is calibrated by using an autocollimator and a regular optical polygon at ambient temperature ranging from 10 to 40 °C. The contrastive analysis is carried out. The experimental results show that the angle measurement errors decrease remarkably, from 110.2″ to 2.7″ after compensation. The mean root mean square error (RMSE) of the residual errors is 0.85″. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]