Optical mouse sensor for detecting height variation and translation of a surface

A new sensing system based on an optical mouse sensor is developed. The optical mouse sensor is traditionally used as a 2D motion sensor, and in this study it is creatively used for detecting the height variation and translation of the object surfaces at the same time. Based on the experimental characteristics of the sensing system, it can be seen that the sensing system is useful in many fields such as robot odometry. The sensing system is based on a low-cost photoelectric sensor, which is a commercial LED-based optical mouse sensor, and thus it is easily available and generalized. Specially, the outputs of the sensor are intuitively displayed on the computer screen and recorded on the hard disk, which greatly improves the convenience of the system. A periodically-square-shaped rubber surface and a periodically-arc-shaped rubber surface are studied in the experiments. Experiments show that the shape information of the object surfaces and the translation direction of the object surfaces can be obtained at the same time. Besides, in the experiments, it is found that the sensitivity of the optical mouse sensor in different translation direction is different.