Sensorless Control of Electric Motors with Kalman Filters: Applications to Robotic and Industrial Systems

The paper studies sensorless control for DC and induction motors, using Kalman Filtering techniques. First the case of a DC motor is considered and Kalman Filter-based control is implemented. Next the nonlinear model of a field-oriented induction motor is examined and the motor's angular velocity is estimated by an Extended Kalman Filter which processes measurements of the rotor's angle. Sensorless control of the induction motor is again implemented through feedback of the estimated state vector. Additionally, a state estimation-based control loop is implemented using the Unscented Kalman Filter. Moreover, state estimation-based control is developed for the induction motor model using a nonlinear flatness-based controller and the state estimation that is provided by the Extended Kalman Filter. Unlike field oriented control, in the latter approach there is no assumption about decoupling between the rotor speed dynamics and the magnetic flux dynamics. The efficiency of the Kalman Filter-based control schemes, for both the DC and induction motor models, is evaluated through simulation experiments