Control Development for the Scaled Experimental Railway Running Gear of DLR

Abstract

Running gears with independently rotating wheels are a major issue of the DLR longterm research project ”Next Generation Train”. This concept relies on mechatronic track guidance and on an appropriate control design. To this aim, a development environment has been implemented that consists of a scaled experimental running gear in hardware and associated simulation models that consider several levels of details, each tailored for a specific step of the control elaboration. The model based control synthesis covers a feed-forward control exploiting the inversion of a non-linear plant model, a Kalman filter that is implemented taking measurement noise into account, and robust state feedback control using gain scheduling in order to stabilize the running gear dynamics. The paper introduces the experimental running gear hardware, reports on the used models, comments on control synthesis steps and finally presents simulation results in order to demonstrate the properties of the designed control.