Design and control of a three-coil permanent magnet spherical motor

Abstract

The permanent magnet (PM) spherical motor has been subject to growing interest from the scientific community due to its potential for applications in distinct areas, particularly in robotics, prosthetics, satellite control, sensors or camera systems. Motivated by this movement, the current work presents all the steps for the efficient design and construction of a spherical motor model, using compound deposition technology with the aid of a 3D printer. Furthermore, we report comprehensive studies on the accuracy of the positioning system of the proposed motor using only three stator coils, which jointly act to move the rotor axis toward any point in the hemisphere. Unmodeled nonlinear phenomena, such as friction, impair accurate positioning of the motor actuator, but this is solved by means of a visual servo control system, which allows the user to collect input–output data to train an artificial neural network model. Details on the construction of the proposed motor are reported, in addition to the numerical results of the positioning control in tracking a desired trajectory.