A Study of Advanced Spherical Motor for Improvement of Multi-DOF Motion

Since robot industry growing, the machine that could move with multi-DOF has been studied in many industrial fields. Spherical motor is one of the multi-DOF machine that doesn't need gear for multi-DOF motion. Unlike conventional motor, spherical motor can not only rotate on the shaft axis (rotating motion), but tilt the shaft with 2-DOF motion (positioning motion). In the typical type of spherical motor, one coil took part in positioning motion and rotating motion at the same time. As the result, the control algorithm was complex. To solve this problem, this study proposed a novel type of coil on the stator. The coils were separated for positioning motion and rotating motion. Thus the linkage flux of rotating coil didn't be affected the positioning angle. In this paper, comparing the back-EMF of typical and novel type was conducted and the driving experiment was carried out as the positioning angle. From the experiment result, the performance of proposed spherical motor could be verified.