Design and development of magnetic position sensor for magnetic guidance system of automated ground vehicle

In this paper, a magnetic position sensor for a magnetic guidance system of automated ground vehicles using linear sections of magnetic fields is proposed. In previous research, the ratio method using vertical versus lateral field was applied to the magnetic position sensor. A drawback of this method is that there is a singularity problem in calculating the ratio as the lateral component approached zero. In this paper, instead of the ratio calculation, the linear method using the equation between vertical magnetic field and the position of a marker is proposed. Due to the linear equation, the proposed method is very robust when noise and disturbance are added to the sensing signal. Since the linear equation is simple, the calculation is fast so that the proposed method is better to establish a real time system. The performance of the proposed method is tested by the experiment using the developed magnetic sensor.