Current Collector for Heavy Vehicles on Electrified Roads

Abstract

We present the adopted motion control schemes of a novel current collector manipulator to be mounted beneath a heavy hybrid electric vehicle to collect electric power from road embedded power lines. We describe our approach of power line detection and tracking based on an array of inductive proximity sensors. The emphasis is on the adopted motion control logic for sequential and closed loop motions to detect and track the power line respectively. We implement the sliding mode control approach for the closed loop control scheme as straightforward solution given the binary nature of the inductive proximity sensors being used. The overall architecture of the entire motion control system is presented. Finally, the implementation of the entire control logic in a form of a state machine is discussed.