Online Estimation and Correction of Systematic Encoder Line Errors

This paper addresses the identification and correction of amplitude and offset errors in the sinusoidal outputs from incremental position encoders. Precise angular position measurement is of high importance in many position control applications. Manufacturing tolerances and noise from thermal and electromagnetic interference sources introduce systematic and random errors in the orthogonal sine cosine output line signals. Evaluation of these signals reproduces deviations in the measured angular position. This paper proposes two methods to identify and compensate for the influence of the systematic errors online without the necessity of a reference measurement during identification. The key component of the methods is a nonlinear estimator that exploits the orthogonality property of harmonic functions. The first method explains the basic idea with a scalar error model and operates continuously but exhibits an angular shift in direction of rotation during transients of the parameters, whereas the second method assumes an error model with error parameters as a function over one full revolution of the encoder. The latter updates the error function iteratively in subsequent revolutions.