Design and control of a three degree-of-freedom permanent magnet spherical actuator

This paper presents a permanent magnet (PM) spherical actuator embedded with a novel three-dimensional (3D) orientation measurement system. The study covers actuator design, torque modeling, and motion control. The spherical actuator consists of a stator with 24 coils and a rotor with 8 PM poles. A high accuracy and resolution, non-blinding 3D measurement mechanism is designed for the rotor orientation detection. The torque output is formulated from finite element (FE) computation and curve fitting method. Due to the nonlinear property of dynamic model, computed torque control law is utilized for the three degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) system motion control. The space geometry method is employed to study the redundancy feature of current inputs, which offers the opportunity for control optimization to improve the power efficiency and the fault tolerance capability of the spherical actuator. Simulations and experiments are then conducted on the developed prototype to validate the design concept, mathematic models and control strategy.