The Active Servo Control of a Single-Deck Planar Maglev Stage

This thesis addresses the control issue in a novel single-deck six degree-of-freedom (DOF) magnetic levitation (maglev) stage. The basic design concept for the single-deck platform is to achieve long range 2-DOF movement by creating a stable trap region for the rotor stage above the stator array of solenoid coils. The solenoids are excited separately to generate restoring forces when the platform with permanent magnets is displaced from its equilibrium position. One can then switch the coils to move the trap region and hence move the stage around. This research uses the ANSOFT finite element analysis simulation results to analyze the solenoid forces and to help us come up with the hardware design of the novel maglev system including the mechanism and the arrangement of the solenoids. Then, we establish the mathematical model of the novel maglev system with 6-DOF and to simulate this system by means of computers and get the control parameters. Besides much skepticism, previous efforts from the NTU PSCL laboratory have demonstrated that the concept should be feasible. In this thesis, we have successfully achieved stable three-dimensional position and attitude control. The thesis describes the mechanical design aspect of the stage. The chapters also describe the process of active servo control design that achieves the stable attitude control.