Development of a spherical motor to rotate in all directions

This paper studies a spherical motor driven by electro-magnetic force. The spherical motor is composed of a rotor and a stator. The rotor has 32 permanent magnets positioned at the vertices of a geometric configuration combined with a regular dodecahedron and a regular icosahedron. There are 84 electromagnets in the stator. The electro-magnets are excited to make the rotor rotate in omnidirection by the pattern such that the electro-magnets near the rotation goal positions of permanent magnets in the rotor after a small time step are excited to the attractive pole and the electromagnets apart from the permanent magnets to the repulsive pole. A simulation program is developed for the purpose of designing the structure and excitation method of electro-magnets and evaluating rotation performance. A prototype spherical motor is developed and the motor is confirmed to rotate is omnidirection by the experiments and simulations for rotation performance evaluation.