Dynamic Investigation of the Hunting Motion of a Railway Bogie in a Curved Track via Bifurcation Analysis

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare the Hopf bifurcation behavior of a two-axle railway bogie and a dual wheelset in the presence of nonlinearities, which are yaw damping forces in the longitudinal suspension system and heuristic creep model of the wheel-rail contact including dead-zone clearance, while running on a curved track. Two-axle railway bogie and dual wheelset were modeled using 12-DOF and 8-DOF system with considering lateral, vertical, roll, and yaw motions. By utilizing Lyapunov’s indirect method, the critical hunting speeds related to these models are evaluated as track radius changes. Hunting defined as the lateral vibration of the wheelset with a large domain was characterized by a limit cycle-type oscillation behavior. Influence of the curved track radius on the lateral displacement of the leading wheelset was also investigated through 2D bifurcation diagram, which is employed in the design of a stable model. Frequency power spectra at critical speeds, which are related to the subcritical and supercritical bifurcations, were represented by comparing the two-axle bogie and dual wheelset model. The evaluated accuracy to predict the critical hunting speed is higher and the hunting frequency in unstable region is lower compared to the dual wheelset model

Novel observers for compensation of communication delay in bilateral control systems

The problem of communication delay in bilateral or teleoperation systems is even more emphasized with the use of the internet for communication, which may give rise to loss of transparency and even instability. To address the problem, numerous methods have been proposed. This study is among the few recent studies taking a disturbance observer approach to the problem of time delay, and introduces a novel sliding-mode observer to overcome specifically the effects of communication delay in the feedback loop. The observer operates in combination with a PD+ controller which controls the system dynamics, while also compensating load torque uncertainties on the slave side. To this aim, an EKF based load estimation algorithm is performed on the slave side. The performance of this approach is tested with computer simulations for the teleoperation of a 1-DOF robotic arm. The simulations reveal an acceptable amount of accuracy and transparency between the estimated slave and actual slave position under both constant and random measurement delay and variable and step-type load variations on the slave side, motivating the use of the approach for internet-based bilateral control systems

Experimental Evaluation of Novel Master-Slave Configurations for Position Control under Random Network Delay and Variable Load for Teleoperation

This paper proposes two novel master-slave configurations that provide improvements in both control and communication aspects of teleoperation systems to achieve an overall improved performance in position control. The proposed novel master-slave configurations integrate modular control and communication approaches, consisting of a delay regulator to address problems related to variable network delay common to such systems, and a model tracking control that runs on the slave side for the compensation of uncertainties and model mismatch on the slave side. One of the configurations uses a sliding mode observer and the other one uses a modified Smith predictor scheme on the master side to ensure position transparency between the master and slave, while reference tracking of the slave is ensured by a proportional-differentiator type controller in both configurations. Experiments conducted for the networked position control of a single-link arm under system uncertainties and randomly varying network delays demonstrate significant performance improvements with both configurations over the past literature

Control and measurement delay compensation in bilateral position control

The main aim of this study is the improvement of the previously presented disturbance observer based bilateral control approaches of the authors with a delay regulator and a model tracking control (MTC) that runs on the slave side. These improvements eliminate the problems related to variable time delay inherent to such systems and model mismatch, respectively, and, hence, addressing the control and measurement delay problems in bilateral control applications. The performance is evaluated experimentally on a single-link arm controlled over the internet. The results demonstrate a significant improvement over the previously presented results obtained under load uncertainties and randomly varying network delays both in the control and feedback loop

Predictive Input Delay Compensation with Grey Predictor for Networked Control System

The performance of networked control systems is affected strictly by time delay. Most of the literature in the area handle the problem from a stability perspective. However, stability optimized algorithms alone are not sufficient to reduce synchronization problems caused by time delay between the action and reaction in geographically distant places, and the effect and performance of other system components should also be taken into account. In teleoperation applications the reference is often provided by a human, known as the operator, and due to the nature of the human system, references provided by the human operator are of a much lower bandwidth when compared to common control reference inputs. This paper focuses on the operator, and proposes an approach to predict the manipulator’s motion (created by the operator) ahead of time with an aim to reduce the time delay between the master and slave manipulator trajectories. To highlight the improvement offered by the developed approach, hereby called Predictive Input Delay Compensator (PIDC), we compare the performance with the only other study in the literature that handles this problem using the Taylor Series approach. The performance of these two approaches is evaluated experimentally for the forward (control) path on a PUMA robot, manipulated by a human operator and it has been demonstrated that the efficient latency in the forward path is decreased by 100ms, on average, reducing the forward latency from 350ms to 250ms

Wavelet packet transform based compression for bilateral teleoperation

This paper introduces a codec scheme for compressing the control and feedback signals in bilateral control systems. The method makes use of Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) and Inverse Wavelet Packet Transform (IWPT) for coding and decoding operations respectively. Data compression is carried out in low pass filter output by reducing the sampling rate; and in high pass filter output by truncating the wavelet coefficients. The proposed codec works on both directions of signal transmission between a master robot and a slave robot over a networked motion control architecture. Following the formulation of the compression/decompression methodology, experimental validation is conducted on a single degree of freedom (DOF) motion control system. In the experiments, responses from different Wavelet structures are analyzed and a comparative study is carried out considering the factors of compression rate, reconstruction power error and real time computational complexity. It is confirmed that the controller using the proposed compression algorithm performs very close to the uncompressed one while enabling transmission of much less data over network

Delay compensation for nonlinear teleoperators using predictor observers

This paper presents a delay compensation technique for nonlinear teleoperators by developing a predictor type sliding mode observer (SMO) that estimates future states of the slave operator. Predicted states are then used in control formulation. In the proposed scheme, disturbance observers (DOB) are also utilized to linearize nonlinear dynamics of the master and slave operators. It is shown that utilization of disturbance observers and predictor observer allow simple PD controllers to be used to provide stable position tracking for bilateral teleoperation. Proposed approach is verified with simulations where it is compared with two state-of-the-art methods. Successful experimental results with a bilateral teleoperation system consisting of a pair of pantograph robots also validates the proposed method

A novel current controller scheme for doubly fed induction generators

This paper presents a novel current control methodology for grid connected doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG) based wind energy conversion systems. Controller is based on a proportional controller with additional first order low pass filter disturbance observer which estimates the parameter dependent nonlinear feed-forward terms. The results in simulations and experimental test bed obviously demonstrate that decoupled control of active and reactive power is achieved without the necessity of additional machine parameter

Modeling and control of doubly fed induction generator with a disturbance observer: a stator voltage oriented approach

The popularity of renewable energy conversion systems, and especially of wind energy, has been growing in recent years. Doubly fed induction generator (DFIG)-based wind energy systems are extensively used due to their wide range of active and reactive power controllability. Conventional DFIG control structures consist of decoupled PI rotor current controllers with stator flux orientation and machine parameter-dependent compensating terms. The accuracy of stator flux calculations is dependent on how accurately the stator resistance is known. Integration problems also exist and additional low-pass filters are implemented to accurately calculate the stator flux. In the current study, machine-dependent compensating terms are estimated with a first-order low-pass filter disturbance observer. Therefore, a single proportional (P) controller is suficient to control decoupled rotor currents. The proposed controller structure is implemented on a MATLAB/Simulink platform with the parameters of 500 kW DFIG used in the MILRES (Turkish National Wind Energy) project. The proposed controller is also experimentally validated in an experimental setup

Wavelet packet transform-based compression for teleoperation

This paper introduces a codec scheme for compressing the control and feedback signals in networked control and teleoperation systems. The method makes use of Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) and Inverse Wavelet Packet Transform (IWPT) for coding and decoding operations, respectively. Data compression is carried out in low-pass filter output by reducing the sampling rate, and in high-pass filter output by truncating the wavelet coefficients. The proposed codec works on both directions of signal transmission between a master robot and a slave robot over a networked motion control architecture. Following the formulation of the compression/decompression methodology, experimental validation is conducted on a single-degree-of-freedom motion control system. In the experiments, responses from different Wavelet structures are analyzed and a comparative study is carried out considering the factors of compression rate, reconstruction power error and real-time computational complexity. It is confirmed that the controller using the proposed compression algorithm performs very close to the uncompressed one while enabling transmission of much less data over the network