Abstract The “Next Generation Train” (NGT) is a double-deck high speed train concept in light-weight design that has been established as a technical and project framework in which the German Aerospace Center gathers its long-term railway vehicle research. To reduce wheel and rail wear and to enhance the passenger capacity, a mechatronic running gear with independently rotating wheels (IRW) is a key vehicle component under research. This running gear requires an advanced control of the lateral dynamics in order to fully exploit its potential in minimizing wear and noise, but this relies on information on its lateral position relative to the track. In daily railway operation it is difficult to directly measure this displacement of the wheel-pair. However, according to previous work it is possible to design an appropriate observer to estimate the lateral position, but its estimation accuracy highly depends on the chosen sensor configuration. Nevertheless, it was shown that the lateral dynamics of the running were not completely reproduced by the system description especially at suddenly changing directions in the movement of the IRW. In this work the system description is complemented by a nonlinear description of the wheel–rail geometry. Therefore, an observability analysis and an observer synthesis to estimate the lateral position for the nonlinear system of the 1:5 scaled hardware running gear is carried out. For validation purposes an extended Kalman filter with the U-D formalism is implemented at the real-time environment of the testbed and the estimation accuracy of the observer configurations is compared.

中文翻译：

---

用非线性轮轨几何估算机电轨道运行装置的车轮横向位置

摘要 “下一代列车”（NGT）是一种轻型设计的双层高速列车概念，是德国航空航天中心长期收集铁路车辆研究的技术和项目框架。为了减少车轮和轨道磨损并提高乘客容量，具有独立旋转车轮（IRW）的机电一体化行走装置是正在研究的关键车辆部件。这种行走装置需要对横向动力学进行高级控制，以充分发挥其在最大限度地减少磨损和噪音方面的潜力，但这依赖于其相对于履带的横向位置信息。在日常铁路运营中，很难直接测量轮对的这种位移。然而，根据之前的工作，可以设计一个合适的观测器来估计横向位置，但其估计精度在很大程度上取决于所选的传感器配置。然而，结果表明，系统描述并没有完全再现跑步的横向动力学，尤其是在 IRW 运动中突然改变方向的情况下。在这项工作中，系统描述由轮轨几何的非线性描述补充。因此，进行了可观测性分析和观测器合成，以估计 1:5 比例硬件行走机构的非线性系统的横向位置。