SUMMARY

Motivated by growing interest and stringent requirements for high precision multi-axis actuators capable of smooth manipulation for a diverse application in medical surgery, manufacturing automation and structural health monitoring systems, this research aims at developing a general method to design a multisensor system that capitalizes on the existing magnetic field in these actuators. This system will eliminate the requirement to install separate sensing mechanisms that might introduce unwanted friction, stiction, and inertia. This proposed scheme discretizes the range of rotor motion in permanent magnet (PM) based devices into smaller magnetic field segments. This systematic segregation is realized through exploitation of the symmetric magnetic field as well as meticulous positioning of sensors. While multisensor approach takes advantage of the structural symmetry to reduce computational overheads as only a fraction of the total magnetic field is required for characterization, it also provides an effective means to overcome non-uniqueness encountered in orientation determination. While this distributed vector field-based sensing is presented in the context of a magnetic actuator, it is expected that the design method can be extended to develop other sensing systems that harnesses electrostatic, gravitational, and other vector fields.