Development of magnetic levitation system with position and orientation control

Abstract

This work demonstrates the design and development of a magnetic levitation (MagLev) system that is able to control both the position and orientation of the levitated object. For the position control, a pole placement method was exploited to estimate parameters of the proportional integral derivative (PID) controller. In addition, the MagLev was constructed using a pair of electromagnets, two infrared (IR) receiver-emitter pairs and a servo motor to allow the orientation of the object to be controlled. The proposed controller was programmed in a LabVIEW environment, which was then compiled and deployed into an embedded NI myRIO board. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method was able to achieve a zero steady-state orientation error when the object was rotated from 0 ◦ to ±90◦ , a steady-state position error of 0.3 cm without rotation, and steady-state position errors of no greater than 1.2 cm with rotation.