Calibration of a multi-mobile coil magnetic manipulation system utilizing a control-oriented magnetic model

In this paper, we address the calibration of a family of magnetic manipulation systems composed of several coils that are moved around by serial robot manipulators. We show in this paper that the calibration of the whole system ultimately results in calibrating the manipulator and coil separately up to an unknown rigid transformation. For calibration of the coil, we propose to use a model that has not been used so far in the literature; a control-oriented model which is sufficiently accurate and computes the magnetic field in real time. A protocol for calibrating the magnetic manipulation system using the Nelder–Mead algorithm to estimate the model parameters is presented. Calibration was performed through simulations and validated experimentally on a physical system. It was observed that the root mean square error was reduced by 37% after calibration of the physical system, indicating an improvement in accurately estimating the magnetic model.