IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 2004 49

High-Performance Speed Measurement by

Suppression of Systematic Resolver
and Encoder Errors
Andreas Bünte, Member, IEEE, and Stephan Beineke, Member, IEEE

Abstract—The subject of this paper is a method which sup- and the switching frequency cannot be further increased, due to
presses systematic errors of resolvers and optical encoders with switching losses. Modern powerful signal processing already
sinusoidal line signals. The proposed method does not require any allows sampling times of the speed control algorithms that are
additional hardware and the computational efforts are minimal.
Since this method does not cause any time delay, the dynamic of lower than the time delay of the current control. With regard
the speed control is not affected. By means of this new scheme, dy- to this, the delay time, caused by the jitter filter of the speed
namic and smooth running characteristics of drive systems are im- measurement, offers the main potentiality for the reduction of
proved considerably. time delays.
Index Terms—Adaptive control, motion control, motor drives, To this end, the improvement of the speed measurement
position measurement, velocity control, velocity measurement. system becomes the key aspect for enhanced dynamics and
smooth running characteristics. The resulting challenge is to
design speed measurement systems offering high resolution
I. INTRODUCTION
and accuracy as well as short delay and dead times.

F OR PRECISE motion control, the quality of the speed feed-

back is one of the most relevant bottlenecks to achieving
high performance. This becomes obvious when the existing lim-
Position and speed measurement in motion control servo
drive systems is most frequently performed by using resolvers.
For higher performance, optical encoders with sinusoidal line
itations are considered that hinder higher dynamics and better signals are preferred. After demodulation of the resolver sig-
smooth running characteristics of the drive system. nals, position information is determined from two sinusoidal,
Imperfections of the mechanical system, such as elasticity 90 phase-shifted line signals for both. For example, the
and backlash, reduce the attainable stiffness of the speed con- position signal is calculated by counting the number of periods
trol. In order to avoid these mechanical imperfections and to and interpolating within one period. The speed is determined
gain higher drive performance, the use of direct drives [1] is be- by deriving the position.
coming more and more common. For direct-drive applications Unfortunately, the line signals contain various errors, which
the inertia is usually high relative to nominal torque, but the high result in position and speed inaccuracies, if they are disregarded
gains, which theoretically result for the speed and position con- at the interpolation. Depending on the frequency of the speed er-
trollers according to standard design rules, often have to be re- rors, either vibrations of the mechanical system are stimulated,
duced in practice due to the insufficient performance of the mea- or the speed control follows these errors with a bad impact on
surement signals. the smooth running characteristics.
If direct drives cannot be used in the application, the stiffness Many approaches have been proposed to improve speed mea-
of the speed control loop can be improved by control schemes surement performance. Gees [3] uses an additional accelera-
adapted to the imperfections of the mechanical system [2]. The tion sensor. This allows noise suppression because the speed
respective control structures use observers to gain information is determined by integrating the acceleration signal. The dis-
about the nonmeasurable states. The observers’ performances, advantages are the high expenses for sensor and wiring. Burke
again, rely mainly on the speed signal quality. [4] and Emura [5] utilize phase-locked loop (PLL) techniques
Other limitations of the dynamics and smooth running that either incur additional hardware expenses or require high
characteristics are caused by delay times in the speed control computing power. Besides this, the performance at low speed is
loop. The delay times cover the dynamic behavior of the current not improved. The same is true for the frequency-shift method
control, a jitter filter for speed measurement and the sample [6] proposed by the authors. Kirchberger [7], however, utilizes
time of the digital control algorithms. The delay time of the an oversampling method. By this method high frequency er-
current control can be decreased only with difficulties, since rors are suppressed by averaging. Similar to the PLL technique,
it depends mainly on the switching frequency of the inverter this method requires high hardware expenses and performance
at low speeds is not improved. The software-based compensa-
Manuscript received July 17, 2002; revised July 15, 2003. Abstract published
on the Internet November 26, 2003. tion of encoder errors proposed by Hoescheler [8] is closer to
A. Bünte was with Lust Antriebstechnik GmbH, 35633 Lahnau, Germany. the practical requirements of drive systems. Remaining disad-
He is now with Lust DriveTronics GmbH, 59425 Unna, Germany. vantages are the need for an adjustment of the compensation
S. Beineke is with Lust Antriebstechnik GmbH, 35633 Lahnau, Germany
(e-mail: [email protected]). on every resolver or encoder and the missing compensation of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2003.822084 long-term drifts by self-tuning methods.
0278-0046/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
50 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004

In this paper the gain-phase-offset-correction method

(GPOC) is introduced, which requires no additional hardware
and only low computing power. The most important errors are
suppressed at any speed by a self-tuning method.

II. SYSTEMATIC ERRORS OF RESOLVERS AND ENCODERS

The following considerations are simplified by combining the
two line signals and of resolvers or encoders to one com-
plex signal . Assuming that:
• random noise (caused, e.g., by quantization errors) can be
neglected and
• the line signals are periodical functions of the position 1 ( = 1): (a) offset errors c = 0:02(1 + j ),
Fig. 1. Interpolation error " c
angle
= 0:02(1 + j ).
(b) amplitude and phase errors c

this complex line signal can be represented by its Fourier series

For optical encoders the conditions are totally different, be-
cause the number of periods per turn is much higher (typically
(1) ).
• The absolute position error is small and the
Since the zero mark depends only on the mechanical fitting positioning accuracy is nearly unaffected.
of the encoder it is always possible to determine an encoder • Even at low and medium speeds, the position error in-
offset, so that the coefficient becomes real, . Addi- cludes higher frequencies than half of the sampling rate
tionally, for most encoders offering only small errors, assump- and the Shannon Theorem is broken. As a conse-
tion can be made, whereas for an ideal encoder quence the speed and position control can be disturbed
even is true. In (1), the coefficient describes the at any frequency up to . Thus, a digital low-pass
offset errors of the line signals, an amplitude differ- filter for speed measurement is only effective for a part of
ence of both line signals and a phase error of the line the error signals. The error components, appearing at low
signals. frequencies after sampling, cause oscillations in speed and
If the encoder is not ideal and only the funda- position control.
mental component is considered for interpolation, an error
for the measured position angle results, which is given by III. SUPPRESSION OF SYSTEMATIC ERRORS
Taking these consequences into account, it becomes obvious,
that system behavior can be considerably improved, if the dom-
inant gain, phase, and offset errors are suppressed. Due to their
small amplitudes, the harmonics of the line signals are neglected
(2) in the following.
Once the phase error , the amplitude correction factors
Maximum limit values for offset errors of optical encoders are and , as well as the offset errors are determined, the corrected
about 4% related to . The same is true for the amplitude dif- line signals can be calculated by
ferences. The harmonics however are usually less dis-
tinct, resulting typically to total harmonic distortions (THDs)
less than 1%. Regarding this, the offset, amplitude, and phase er-
rors are dominant and the harmonic distortion can be neglected.
Fig. 1 illustrates an example for the position errors caused (3)
by an erroneous interpolation. Their effects on the drive per-
formance mainly depend on the number of encoder periods per It has to be considered that the phase error is ambiguous.
turn, the absolute speed, and the sampling rate of the position Therefore, it cannot be decided, which line signal shows the re-
measurement. spective error.
For resolvers, the number of periods per turn is small (typi- Now, a new scheme is derived, which determines these cor-
cally ), which leads to the following consequences. rection terms. To gain a high acceptance in the field of commer-
• The absolute position error cannot be ne- cial drives it shows the following features.
glected and limits the positioning accuracy. • No additional hardware efforts are required.
• Even at highest speeds, the Shannon Theorem is fulfilled • Standard analog digital converters for drive applications
concerning the position error harmonics. without oversampling facilities are used.
• At low speeds, the bandwidth of the speed control is higher • Additional computation power is low and the scheme has
than the frequency of the speed errors. Thus, the speed and been implemented on a low-cost 16-bit microcontroller.
the position control follow the faulty measured speed. • The method is suited for resolvers and optical encoders.
BÜNTE AND BEINEKE: SPEED MEASUREMENT BY SUPPRESSION OF SYSTEMATIC RESOLVER AND ENCODER ERRORS 51

Fig. 2. Squared magnitude of s(c = 1): (a) c = 0:02(1+j ) and (b) c =

0:02(1 + j ). Fig. 3. New scheme for suppressing gain and phase errors of sinusoidal line
signals.

• The method is applicable in a wide speed range.

• The method adapts online to time-varying encoder errors. has to be calculated. The integration variable, position angle ,
• No complicated commissioning of the scheme is can be replaced by the product of the actual speed of the drive
necessary. and the time , , which simplifies a time discrete
The proposed method analyzes the squared magnitude of calculation.
the line signals and utilizes the orthogonality of trigonometric Besides this, calculation efforts are further reduced, when in-
functions. tegration is not performed exactly over one period and the re-
For an ideal encoder, the squared magnitude given by spective feedforward-control-oriented scheme, given by (6), is
replaced by a feedback scheme using I-controllers. In this case
(4) the time constants of the I-controllers have to be sufficient large,
because the correction values can not be exactly determined at
any time and their mean values have to be calculated over a suf-
is constant for any position angle. ficient number of periods. However, a large time constant is not
With the assumptions discussed above, namely, is real and critical, because the controller has to react only to slow drift ef-
, this product can be simplified as follows: fects of the encoder signals.
Following this approach the control scheme depicted in
Fig. 3. results, which determines the correction terms of phase
and amplitude errors.
The squared magnitude is calculated from the corrected line
signals, see (3), and the actual interpolation angle is calculated,
which can be utilized for position measurement.
The squared magnitude is compared to the respective refer-
(5) ence and an error signal is fed back via the amplitude controller
to adjust the amplitude correction factors. The amplitude differ-
This result, illustrated in Fig. 2, is interesting under various ence is weighted by the terms and , and the respec-
aspects. tive signals are given to the controllers for phase and amplitude
• Each component causes amplitude variations with error. The control scheme of Fig. 4 shows an offset correction
frequencies at the harmonics of the fundamental. using the same scheme. Cross correlation of the squared mag-
• If an amplitude variation of the th harmonic appears, it nitude is performed simply with the line signals. Note that all
can be caused either by the or the harmonic five controllers needed for the error correction are I-controllers
of the line signals. which results in minimal computational efforts.
• If one of both possible line signal harmonics can be ne- Of course, applications exist where the assumptions are not
glected, the coefficient can be determined unambigu- valid and the proposed online adaptation method is not prac-
ously from the time signal of the squared magnitude. tical. Examples are fast point-to-point positioning with small
To determine these coefficients, the cross-correlation method distances, where less than one period of the resolver’s line sig-
is well suited, which allows a good suppression of stochastic nals can be evaluated. For encoders, operation is critical at con-
error signals and is able to cancel completely the influences of stant speeds, which result in frequencies of the line signals close
undesired harmonics. to or respective harmonics. In these cases only
For cross correlation the integral the online adaptation has to be suspended. The correction of the
errors itself can be performed with the last determined values
continuously. However, an offline tuning of the errors is still
(6) possible in all applications, where the speed of the drive can be
chosen freely during commissioning.
52 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004

Fig. 4. Scheme for suppressing offsets of sinusoidal line signals.

Fig. 6. (a) Original line signals and (b) corrected line signals of resolver
system.

Fig. 5. Results obtained with resolver, (a) without and (b) with correction.

IV. PRACTICAL RESULTS

The proposed method has been integrated into a servo con-
troller drive, the CDD 3000 of Lust Antriebstechnik, Lahnau, Fig. 7. Speed reversal with resolver, (a) with correction and (b) without
Germany. All calculations are performed by a simple 16-bit mi- correction.
crocontroller in a few microseconds. No additional hardware
components are needed. signals are shown in Fig. 6. In spite of the small errors of the line
signals, the speed error is enormous. According to (2), it can be
A. Results Obtained With Resolvers derived, that the offset causes the dominant error in this case,
The effects of the proposed new method on servo drives because the first harmonic makes the main contribution to the
equipped with resolvers has been examined on a 0.47-kW speed error. With enabled error correction and online adaptation
synchronous motor drive with a rated speed of 3000 r/min. The the behavior can be improved significantly and the speed error
motor and resolver both have six poles. is decreased by about a factor of 10. The offset error determined
For the validation of the measurements this motor is also by the correction scheme is about 2.4% and 1.2% for both line
equipped with an additional optical encoder (1024 periods per signals. The differences of the amplitudes are about 1.2% and
turn). Because of its higher performance compared to the re- the phase error is about 0.25 .
solver under test, this measuring system provides nearly the ac- The good performance of the correction scheme at a speed
tual speed of the drive. Therefore, this speed, calculated from reversal is shown in Fig. 7. A slow zero crossing of the speed
the encoder signals, can be regarded as a reference. has been achieved by limiting the torque to 1 N m. Even the
One result, obtained at a constant motor speed of 1000 r/min, zero crossing of the speed with corresponding low frequencies
is illustrated in Fig. 5. The corresponding and demodulated line of the line signals of the resolver does not affect the correction
BÜNTE AND BEINEKE: SPEED MEASUREMENT BY SUPPRESSION OF SYSTEMATIC RESOLVER AND ENCODER ERRORS 53

servo controller drive CDD3000 of Lust Antriebstechnik. For

resolvers as well as for encoders the smooth running character-
istics can be enhanced enormously. The benefits of this scheme
have already been proven in various industrial applications, es-
pecially in drives featuring high inertia, e.g., direct drives used
for handling machines and lifts, and in several drives featuring
low damped eigenfrequencies due to elastic couplings.

REFERENCES
[1] N. Wavre and J.-M. Vaucher, “Motion control with high performance
direct drives and systems (rotatory and linear),” in Conf. Rec. Intelligent
Motion/PCIM 1999, pp. 55–61.
[2] F. Schütte, S. Beineke, and H. Grotstollen, “Knowledge based controller
selection for electrical drives with imperfect mechanics,” in Proc. IEEE
IECON’98, 1998, pp. 1445–1450.
[3] A. Gees, “Accelerometer—Enhanced speed estimation for linear-drive
machine tool axes,” Ph.D. dissertation, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1996.
[4] J. Burke, J. F. Moynihan, and K. Unterkofler, “Extraction of high res-
olution position information from sinusoidal encoders,” in Conf. Rec.
Intelligent Motion/PCIM 2000, pp. 217–222.
Fig. 8. Measured speed and line signals of encoder system. [5] T. Emura, L. Wang, M. Yamanaka, and H. Nakamura, “A high-precision
positioning servo controller based on phase/frequency detecting tech-
nique of two-phase-type PLL,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 47, pp.
scheme as well as the self-tuning. The smooth running has been 1298–1305, Dec. 2000.
[6] S. Bünte, S. Beineke, and U. Schumacher, “High performance speed
improved over the whole speed range. measurement method,” in Conf. Rec. EPE 2001, pp. 1–10.
[7] R. Kirchberger and B. Hiller, “Oversampling method for position and
B. Results Obtained With Encoders speed measurement of electrical drives with incremental encoders” (in
German), in Conf. Rec. SPS/IPC/DRIVES 1999, pp. 598–606.
Further experiments have been performed on a 3.6-kW induc- [8] B. Höscheler and L. Szamel, “Innovative technique for easy high-resolu-
tion position acquisition with sinusoidal incremental encoders,” in Conf.
tion motor drive, with a rated speed of 1500 r/min. The motor Rec. Intelligent Motion/PCIM 1997, pp. 407–416.
is equipped with an optical encoder system (2048 periods per
turn). Since no measuring system with a significant higher per-
formance has been available, no speed signal can be given as
a reference. On the other hand, variations of the instantaneous Andreas Bünte (M’00) was born in Rheda-Wieden-
brück, Germany, in 1965. He received the Dipl.-Ing.
speed with the first and the second harmonics of the line signals (M.S.) and Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degrees in electrical engi-
frequency can be regarded as measurement errors, because the neering from the University of Paderborn, Paderborn,
inertia prevents that the mechanical system oscillates with these Germany, in 1991 and 1998, respectively.
His research at the Laboratory of Power Elec-
high frequencies. tronics and Electrical Drives was in the areas of
Fig. 8 illustrates results at a constant speed of 4 r/min. Even self-commissioning of induction motor drives and
if the variations of the speed determined from the uncorrected field-oriented control in a very wide flux-weakening
region. From 1996 to 2002, he was Head of the Re-
line signals are low, it shows frequencies corresponding to the search Department of Lust Antriebstechnik GmbH,
line signals. With enabled error correction and online adaptation Lahnau, Germany. At Lust Antriebstechnik, he worked on adjustable-speed
the behavior can be improved significantly and the speed error drives, in particular, control algorithms, self-commissioning, sensorless con-
trol, high-speed applications, teleservice, and telediagnostics. He joined Lust
is decreased by about a factor of 5. The offset error determined DriveTronics GmbH, Unna, Germany, in 2002 as Research and Development
by the correction scheme is about 0.9% and 3% for both Manager. Lust Drivetronics designs, manufactures, and sells servo-controlled
line signals. The difference in amplitudes is about 0.4% and the ac drives.
phase error is about 3.7 .

V. CONCLUSION Stephan Beineke (M’97) was born in Höxter,

Germany, in 1967. He received the Dip.-Ing. (M.S.)
In this paper the fundamental impact of the speed measure- and the Dipl.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degrees in electrical
ment system on the smooth running characteristics and the engineering from the University of Paderborn,
Paderborn, Germany, in 1994 and 1999, respectively.
dynamic behavior of modern servo-controlled drives has been At the Laboratory of Power Electronics and
shown. For high-performance drives it is very important to Electrical Drives, he worked on control algorithms
suppress the line signals’ offset errors and amplitude errors as featuring active vibration damping, online and
offline estimation methods to determine the mechan-
well as phase errors. To this end, the new method GPOC has ical drive parameters, and sensorless control for ac
been presented. Special benefits of this new scheme are the motors.
minimal computational efforts and the online tuning ability. In 1999, he joined Lust Antriebstechnik GmbH,
Lahnau, Germany, where he is the Head of the Software Development Depart-
The correct functioning and the outstanding performance of ment. At Lust Antriebstechnik, he develops control algorithms for servo drives,
the GPOC method have been shown by measurements of the frequency inverters, and high-speed drives.