Compensation of magnetostrictive Hysteresis by Arduino: Floating versus fixed-point performances

The use of embedded computational capabilities in devices with magnetostrictive materials allows the design of objects, able to show smart features without the use of external controllers/devices. However, in the magnetostrictive devices world, the problem of getting smart performances in actuation and sensing, with a lower cost, has been faced a few times to date. In this paper, we present the compensation of the hysteresis of a magnetostrictive actuator using a low-cost Arduino platform (fixed-point mathematic). In this case, a quasi-linear actuator is obtained. The experimental performances are compared with the ones of a standard xpctarget-MATLAB environment (floating point mathematic). We found that the Arduino solution is largely acceptable, dealing with compensation errors within a few percents, and fast enough compensation times, up to sampling frequencies of kilohertz.