Electromagnetic Tracking System Design for Location and Orientation Estimation

This paper presents an electromagnetic (EM) tracking system design for location and orientation estimations. Consisting of a sensing coil and a field generator formed by six excitation coils, the system tracks the sensing coil within the influence of the change in the magnetic field produced by the field generator. Closed-form solutions are formulated for the electromotive force (EMF) induced in the sensing coil, and the effects of translational and angular displacements are investigated. For the inverse calculation, artificial neural network (ANN) models are proposed to estimate the location and orientation of the sensing coil based on analytical EMFs. The closed-form solutions are verified by Finite Element Analysis (FEA), and the ANN models are also numerically validated. Experiments are conducted with a simplified prototype composed of one excitation and one sensing coil. The analytical model is first verified for both translational and angular displacements, and the proposed ANN models for inverse calculations are also validated by emulating the relative spatial relations between each excitation coil and the sensing coil.