Control Method in Minimum Infinity-Norm Approach for Multicoil Magnetic Manipulation System

A magnetic manipulation system for medical applications is designed with its coils widely distributed over a sufficiently large space such that a patient can lie down, an operator can enjoy the accessibility, and the workspace is sufficiently large. However, this design makes the current references asymmetrical. Moreover, at the corners, some references might exceed the coil current rating, and the magnetic field cannot be synthesized as desired. To address this overcurrent reference problem, this article proposes a magnetic manipulation system controlled with the minimum infinity-norm current reference. In many magnetic manipulation systems, the current reference for a given motion command of the magnetic field is infinite. And the minimum infinity-norm current reference is the most feasible. The proposed control strategy presents an increased maximum synthesizable magnetic field in an arbitrary direction, including the worst case direction, compared with the conventional field of Moore–Penrose inverse control. To verify the effectiveness, the worst case direction of the magnetic field of each method is analytically derived. And, the controllable areas of the eight-coil magnetic manipulation system are compared. This article also proposes a soft mode transition between the two methods for efficiency enhancement. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.