Sensor fusion based testing station for unbalanced load estimation in horizontal washing machines

A sensor fusion testing station has been set up to benchmark the performance of various off-balance estimation algorithms for horizontal washing machines. Multiple mechanical sensors including laser displacement sensors, load cells and are installed on the testing station. The measurements are used to derive the off-balance information, i.e., magnitude and location, inside the washing machine with models established through designed experiments. Neural networks (NN) and support vector machines (SVM) are used for the modeling purpose and their performance are compared in this paper.