Position and Speed Estimation for BLDC Motors Using Fourier-Series Regression [in press]

The control of brushless DC motors requires high-resolution angular position and accurate speed information. However, available sensor-based solutions only measure either the position or the speed directly, and then approximate the other numerically. In this work, a novel technique is presented to estimate both of these values simultaneously by sensing the stray magnetic field of the internal permanent magnets of the motor. However, achieving this requires the following two challenges to be addressed. First, the relationship between the magnetic field and the motor position is distorted by the rotational speed in a non-intuitive way, requiring careful modeling of these dependencies. Second, the derived model needs to consider that the angular position data is periodic by nature, but the magnetic field data and the angular speed data are linear (i.e., non-periodic). To achieve this, we introduce two different multidimensional regression models based on the Fourier series. Both models are first trained offline using reference data, and then used as a measurement function in a nonlinear estimator such as the EKF for online estimation. Evaluations show that both models outperform state-of-the-art techniques.