Concept development and design of a spherical wheel motor (SWM)

Abstract

This paper presents the design concept, models, and open-loop control of a particular form of a variablereluctance spherical motor (VRSM), referred here as a spherical wheel motor (SWM). Unlike existing spherical motors where design focuses have been on controlling the three degrees of freedom (DOF) angular displacements, the SWM offers a means to control the orientation of a continuously rotating shaft in an open-loop (OL) fashion. We provide a formula for deriving different switching sequences (full step and fractional step) for a specified current magnitude and pole configurations. The concept feasibility of an OL controlled SWM has been experimentally demonstrated on a prototype that has 8 rotor permanent-magnet (PM) pole-pairs and 10 stator electromagnet (EM) pole-pairs.