Precise Positioning of Linear Motor Mover Directly from the Phase Difference Analysis

This article presents a new visual detection method with high precision, robustness, and processing rate to estimate the linear motor displacements. Subpixel level location is achieved by using the phase-difference matrix and a structured aperiodic fence stripe placed on the mover. Based on Fourier shifted properties, this subpixel method builds a linear relation between the mover's spatial displacements and the direct frequency-domain phase difference (not the phase correlation matrix) to calculate the translational shift in a series of stripe images; thereby, precisely determining the mover location of linear motor. Unlike the traditional phase correlation algorithm, the proposed method converts 2-D stripe images into 1-D signals via the projection technique and then uses the least squares method to linearly fit the phase difference slope, thereby acquiring subpixel shifts with less time complexity. Due to the motion parameter that is directly estimated from the phase difference, this method is also insensitive to the gray-scale change with certain anti-interference capability, thereby making it suitable for measuring the moving position of the mover. Experimental results show that the proposed vision-based detection method is efficient and applicable for real-time accurate positioning of linear motor, and the measuring root mean square error is about 0.05 mm.