Aaron Nichols, Zack Smith, Chris Van Loon
Non-contact position sensing is a valuable tool in many engineering applications. One application that motivates
this research is the ability to track the location of a tumor on a lung. Radiation treatment on lung tumors is often
done by just radiating a large area of „about‟ where the tumor resonates. If a more accurate location of the tumor
could be found while the patient breathes the overall effectiveness and safety of the therapy could be increased.
The goal of the device to be used is ultimately to determine the location of a magnet in a 3-dimenational space. To
gain an understanding how this is done the following model is proposed. Suppose there were six magnetic-sensors
arranged in a grid with the geometric properties as shown in figure 1. Each sensor reads magnetic field in either the
x or y axis (as indicated by the blue „x‟ or „y‟). In this arrangement, the „z‟ axis is to be assumed to be in the
direction coming out of the page towards the reader. The magnet to be used as the marker (location) will be
assumed to be small enough to be considered a magnetic dipole, or a point source of magnetic field. The equation
that relates the magnetic field to location of the dipole (or magnet) is an equation with 6 design variables; the x, y
and z values of the magnet‟s location, and the components of the magnetic moment along each of these axes (m, n
and p, respectively). These equations are show below:
Where;
Therefore, given sensor readings from each of the sensors in the 2-D grid shown in figure 1, a magnet‟s location can
be established by using the equations listed for the „x‟ and „y‟ axis shown above. Figure 2 is a sketch that attempts to
graphically show how the system would be set up. Below both figures is our formal objective function for our
project:
To solve our objective function for our final project, Powell‟s Method of Conjugate Directions was used to find
the optimal point for every sensor reading. This method was chosen because:
 No gradient information is needed to solve the problem
 other methods such as Steepest Descent need gradient information to find the minimization of the
problem
 Our objective function is of degree 2
 Terms within our objective function yield a quadratic function. Since Powell‟s Method assumes a
quadratic objective function, we thought this was another good reason in using this method to
minimize our objective function.
In implementing Powell‟s Method, we will be able to minimize our objective function so that it could be close to
equaling our six magnetic field sensors.
To simulate a moving magnet in our array, a MATLAB program was written to
plot a magnet moving through a 3-dimensional plane in a spiral motion. Doing
this gives us a collection of sensor readings that can be used in our objective
function to find the location of the magnet in the array. Figure 3 is the plotted
location of the magnet that our six magnetic sensors would read in blue. These
locations would then be solved as magnetic fields and be established in a vector
that is used by the objective function as the “sensor readings”. In our program,
once the difference between our magnetic field and sensor readings are negligible,
our program would stop and plot the point.
Figure 4 to the right shows the results of our optimized location (in red) when
using the sensor readings. Using our initial guess, our results for our objective
function are almost identical to the sensor readings that were found for our
experiment. A video of our optimized solutions in Fig. 4 can be watched on
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0Nc9b2o7c
Another analysis that was completed was the accuracy of our optimization for
different speeds of the magnet. Figure 5 shows that as our magnet speed
increases, the accuracy of our optimization decreases. This is understandable
since our sensors are only accurate up until 0.6 cm/sec; if the magnet is
travelling at a speed faster then this, the sensor would not be completely accurate.
One problem that was encountered with our results was that if
our initial guess was more than a centimeter away from the real
value, our objective function would not converge to a solution that
would be a result from the sensor readings. To correct this, we
think our experiment would need additional sensors so that we
would have more magnetic field readings, therefore creating
additional points to find our x,y, and z plane locations of our
magnet. For future work, an optimization analysis should be
completed for this experiment that includes at least three
additional sensors so that a more accurate optimization can be
made for the magnets location.