Development of a control circuit for an electromagnetic smart surface

Arrayed micro actuators are increasingly used with various kinds of driving methods, especially to realize planar conveyance tasks. Using this concept, the flexible micro electromagnetic conveyor system presented in this paper has been developed. The presented system consists of arrayed elementary cells which can move a mobile pallet placed on its top side. To ensure long range motion flexibility, each cell must be individually controlled to manage the movement of the pallet by selecting the corresponding cells. A control strategy is then needed while avoiding a huge number of wires and power supplies required by each cell. This paper presents a control circuit using a row/column addressing scheme designed to control the presented device. Experimental tests have been done to validate the proposed control circuit design. The results show that the functioning of the device remains the same with the activation of the selected cells only thanks to the developed control circuit.