Abstract
We developed a sensorless angle detection system for our original flapping robot equipped with a "scissors swing motor (SSM)". SSM comprises a pair of voice coil motors (VCM) of hard disk drive (HDD), and it enables us to control the amplitude and frequency of the flapping motion arbitrarily. The back electromotive force (back-emf) of VCM is measured from the current and voltage of the VCM to detect the swing angle. The waveform of the detected swing angle successfully reproduced the expected trajectory of VCM arm's angle instructed by the input signal. Suppression of high frequency noise of current sensor is effective to improve the accuracy. Removing the drift component of the back-emf signal is essential to accurately estimate the swing angle. The developed sensorless angle detection system helps miniaturization and weight reduction of flapping robots with SSM.
