Design and Development of a Self-Calibration-Based Inductive Absolute Angular Position Sensor

This paper presents an inductive-based sensor for absolute angular position measurement. Its structure is basically similar to a resolver, but it has two groups of pickup coils that use the same magnetic field to produce two different signals for absolute measurement and online self-calibration. The proposed sensor mainly consists of a ferromagnetic stator, two ferromagnetic rotors, and four groups of coils. Two groups of coils in the stator working as excitation coils are supplied with quadrature alternating current (AC) signals to generate quadrature magnetic fields both in temporal and spatial domains. The other two groups of coils in the rotors working as pickup coils receive magnetic fields to produce two sine signals whose phases are proportional to the displacement of the rotors. However, the phases of the sine signals have different periods of variation in the full measurement range. The sensor uses this different phase variation to determine the absolute angular position and perform the online self-calibration. A sensor model has been built and simulated first to verify the feasibility of the sensor. Then, a sensor prototype was developed based on the sensor model. The experimental results of the sensor prototype show that the sensor has big but regular measurement error using any group of pickup coils before conducting calibration, and finally, the measurement error reduced up to 85% by use of the online self-calibration method presented in this paper.