Development of a Novel Spherical Actuator With Two Degrees of Freedom

This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel spherical actuator that can generate two tilt-motion degrees of freedom. Voice coil motors were adopted as actuators in a spherical actuator to utilize their simple driving principle and constant torque coefficient characteristic. The sensing and guiding mechanism was built inside the proposed spherical actuator and enabled compactness and ease of connection to other application systems. The actuator was designed using a design optimization framework to obtain high torque. A prototype actuator was manufactured with optimally designed parameters, and its performance was evaluated.