Levitation and Propulsion Control of a Magnetic Levitation System with Two Degrees of Freedom

The design and implementation of a control scheme for the levitation height and angular position reference tracking in a two degrees of freedom levitation system is presented. The levitation system prototype is described and a nonlinear model that reflects its dynamic behaviour is obtained. In particular, the force to current relationship that is needed to implement the control scheme is proposed and experimentally validated. The control scheme design is based on the sliding mode technique and it was implemented on the prototype, thus allowing to evaluate its peformance. The limitations of the power circuits associated to the prototype were also evaluated through some experiments.