Because a modular motor drive is composed of multiple identical pole drive units and controllers, it can be considered as a multi-agent system. This makes modular motor drives particularly interesting during faults, when the remaining healthy agents assure the continuity of operation. Nevertheless, for some crucial information such as the rotor position, these drives still rely on a single sensor which introduces a single point of failure. In this work, this single high-resolution position sensor is replaced by multiple binary, low-resolution position sensors. A vector tracking observer algorithm, implemented in the different controllers, processes this low-resolution sensor data into a position estimate. Subsequently, these position estimates of the different agents are exchanged with other agents using a distributed averaging algorithm. For this latter approach, it is shown in this work that it improves the position estimation under healthy conditions as well as during agent malfunctions. The concept is demonstrated on a modular axial-flux permanent magnet synchronous machine with fifteen pole drive units, each equipped with a low-resolution position sensor, that are assigned to five agents.

中文翻译：

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使用低分辨率传感器的模块化电机驱动器中的多智能体位置估计


由于模块化电机驱动由多个相同极驱动单元和控制器组成，因此可以将其视为多智能体系统。这使得模块化电机驱动器在故障期间特别有趣，此时剩余的健康代理可确保运行的连续性。然而，对于一些关键信息（例如转子位置），这些驱动器仍然依赖于单个传感器，这会引入单点故障。在这项工作中，这个单个高分辨率位置传感器被多个二进制低分辨率位置传感器取代。在不同控制器中实现的矢量跟踪观测器算法将低分辨率传感器数据处理为位置估计。随后，使用分布式平均算法与其他代理交换不同代理的这些位置估计。对于后一种方法，本工作表明它改进了健康条件下以及代理故障期间的位置估计。该概念在具有十五个极驱动单元的模块化轴向磁通永磁同步电机上进行了演示，每个驱动单元都配备了低分辨率位置传感器，并分配给五个代理。