Design, analysis and control of an electro-magnetic actuator

In this paper, a prototype of a non-conventional electro-magnetic actuator (EMA) is proposed. It is a repulsive magnetic system consisting of a motion pad and two active coils. The movement of the motion pad is due to the repelling force between the coils and the magnets affixed to the pad. First, the dynamic model is derived and analyzed. Next, an adaptive controller is developed to deal with the unknown parameters with the objective of precision positioning in this system. From the experimental results, satisfactory performances including regulation accuracy and large-moving range have been demonstrated. This implies the excellent performance is possible to achieve by just using an advanced controller rather than a costly hardware setup.