Observer-based self sensing for digital (on–off) single-coil solenoid valves is investigated. Self sensing refers to the case where merely the driving signals used to energize the actuator (voltage and coil current) are available to obtain estimates of both the position and velocity. A novel observer approach for estimating the position and velocity from the driving signals is presented, where the dynamics of the mechanical subsystem can be neglected in the model. Both the effect of eddy currents and saturation effects are taken into account in the observer model. Practical experimental results are shown and the new method is compared with a full-order sliding mode observer.
One major realm of Condition Based Maintenance is finding features that reflect the current health state of the asset or component under observation. Most of the existing approaches are accompanied with high computational costs during the different feature processing phases making them infeasible in a real-world scenario. In this paper a feature generation method is evaluated compensating for two problems: (1) storing and handling large amounts of data and (2) computational complexity. Both aforementioned problems are existent e.g. when electromagnetic solenoids are artificially aged and health indicators have to be extracted or when multiple identical solenoids have to be monitored. To overcome those problems, Compressed Sensing (CS), a new research field that keeps constantly emerging into new applications, is employed. CS is a data compression technique allowing original signal reconstruction with far fewer samples than Shannon-Nyquist dictates, when some criteria are met. By applying this method to measured solenoid coil current, raw data vectors can be reduced to a way smaller set of samples that yet contain enough information for proper reconstruction. The obtained CS vector is also assumed to contain enough relevant information about solenoid degradation and faults, allowing CS samples to be used as input to fault detection or remaining useful life estimation routines. The paper gives some results demonstrating compression and reconstruction of coil current measurements and outlines the application of CS samples as condition monitoring data by determining deterioration and fault related features. Nevertheless, some unresolved issues regarding information loss during the compression stage, the design of the compression method itself and its influence on diagnostic/prognostic methods exist.
Standardmäßig werden zur Modellierung magnetischer Systeme für regelungstechnische Anwendungen oder im Bereich der Diagnose und Prognose konzentriert parametrische Modelle verwendet. Falls eine hohe Qualität der Prozessabbildung erforderlich ist, z.B. um Wirbelströme oder Sättigung geeignet zu berücksichtigen, nehmen diese Modelle schnell relativ hohe Ordnungen an. Es ist seit einiger Zeit bekannt, dass verteilparametrische Systeme, die z.B. (Feld-)Diffusionsprozesse beinhalten, durch niederdimensionale Modelle mit nicht ganzzahligen Ableitungen, so genannte fraktionale Modelle, sehr gut abgebildet werden können. Im Bereich der magnetischen Aktuatoren wurden diese vor rund 10 Jahren zum ersten Mal untersucht. Seitdem wird auf diesem Gebiet in verschiedenen Arbeitsgruppen geforscht. Während im Frequenzbereich die Handhabung fraktionaler Systeme einfach ist, sind Anwendungen im Zeitbereich bisher insbesondere bei zeitkritischen Anwendungen kaum anzutreffen. Der Beitrag stellt die prinzipielle Idee dar und zeigt Möglichkeiten zum Einsatz dieser Verfahren im Bereich magnetischer Aktoren auf. In einer konkreten Anwendung wird in Simulation und Experiment demonstriert, wie mit Hilfe dieser Modelle Zustandsschätzung in Magnetaktuatoren erfolgen kann und welche Vorteile sich dadurch ergeben.
This paper presents a new likelihood-based partitioning method of the measurement set for the extended object probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter framework. Recent work has mostly relied on heuristic partitioning methods that cluster the measurement data based on a distance measure between the single measurements. This can lead to poor filter performance if the tracked extended objects are closely spaced. The proposed method called Stochastic Partitioning (StP) is based on sampling methods and was inspired by a former work of Granström et. al. In this work, the StP method is applied to a Gaussian inverse Wishart (GIW) PHD filter and compared to a second filter implementation that uses the heuristic Distance Partitioning (DP) method. The performance is evaluated in Monte Carlo simulations in a scenario where two objects approach each other. It is shown that the sampling based StP method leads to an improved filter performance compared to DP.
Extracting suitable features from acquired data to accurately depict the current health state of a system is crucial in data driven condition monitoring and prediction. Usually, analogue sensor data is sampled at rates far exceeding the Nyquist-rate containing substantial amounts of redundancies and noise, imposing high computational loads due to the subsequent and necessary feature processing chain (generation, dimensionality reduction, rating and selection). To overcome these problems, Compressed Sensing can be used to sample directly to a compressed space, provided the signal at hand and the employed compression/measurement system meet certain criteria. Theory states, that during this compression step enough information is conserved, such that a reconstruction of the original signal is possible with high probability. The proposed approach however does not rely on reconstructed data for condition monitoring purposes, but uses directly the compressed signal representation as feature vector. It is hence assumed that enough information is conveyed by the compression for condition monitoring purposes. To fuse the compressed coefficients into one health index that can be used as input for remaining useful life prediction algorithms and is limited to a reasonable range between 1 and 0, a logistic regression approach is used. Run-to-failure data of three translational electromagnetic actuators is used to demonstrate the health index generation procedure. A comparison to the time domain ground truth signals obtained from Nyquist sampled coil current measurements shows reasonable agreement. I.e. underlying wear-out phenomena can be reproduced by the proposed approach enabling further investigation of the application of prognostic methods.
With the high resolution of modern sensors such as multilayer LiDARs, estimating the 3D shape in an extended object tracking procedure is possible. In recent years, 3D shapes have been estimated in spherical coordinates using Gaussian processes, spherical double Fourier series or spherical harmonics. However, observations have shown that in many scenarios only a few measurements are obtained from top or bottom surfaces, leading to error-prone estimates in spherical coordinates. Therefore, in this paper we propose to estimate the shape in cylindrical coordinates instead, applying harmonic functions. Specifically, we derive an expansion for 3D shapes in cylindrical coordinates by solving a boundary value problem for the Laplace equation. This shape representation is then integrated in a plain greedy association model and compared to shape estimation procedures in spherical coordinates. Since the shape representation is only integrated in a basic estimator, the results are preliminary and a detailed discussion for future work is presented at the end of the paper.
In many industrial applications a workpiece is continuously fed through a heating zone in order to reach a desired temperature to obtain specific material properties. Many examples of such distributed parameter systems exist in heavy industry and also in furniture production such processes can be found. In this paper, a real-time capable model for a heating process with application to industrial furniture production is modeled. As the model is intended to be used in a Model Predictive Control (MPC) application, the main focus is to achieve minimum computational runtime while maintaining a sufficient amount of accuracy. Thus, the governing Partial Differential Equation (PDE) is discretized using finite differences on a grid, specifically tailored to this application. The grid is optimized to yield acceptable accuracy with a minimum number of grid nodes such that a relatively low order model is obtained. Subsequently, an explicit Runge-Kutta ODE (Ordinary Differential Equation) solver of fourth order is compared to the Crank-Nicolson integration scheme presented in Weiss et al. (2022) in terms of runtime and accuracy. Finally, the unknown thermal parameters of the process are estimated using real-world measurement data that was obtained from an experimental setup. The final model yields acceptable accuracy while at the same time shows promising computation time, which enables its use in an MPC controller.
In this paper, a gain-scheduled nonlinear control structure is proposed for a surface vessel, which takes advantage of extended linearisation techniques. Thereby, an accurate tracking of desired trajectories can be guaranteed that contributes to a safe and reliable water transport. The PI state feedback control is extended by a feedforward control based on an inverse system model. To achieve an accurate trajectory tracking, however, an observer-based disturbance compensation is necessary: external disturbances by cross currents or wind forces in lateral direction and wave-induced measurement disturbances are estimated by a nonlinear observer and used for a compensation. The efficiency and the achieved tracking performance are shown by simulation results using a validated model of the ship Korona at the HTWG Konstanz, Germany. Here, both tracking behaviour and rejection of disturbance forces in lateral direction are considered.
In this paper an approach towards databased fault diagnosis of linear electromagnetic actuators is presented. Time and time-frequency-domain methods were applied to extract fault related features from current and voltage measurements. The resulting features were transformed to enhance class separability using either Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or Optimal Transformation. Feature selection and dimensionality reduction was performed employing a modified Fisher-ratio. Fault detection was carried out using a Support-Vector-Machine classifier trained with randomly selected data subsets. Results showed, that not only the used feature sets (time-domain/time-frequency-domain) are crucial for fault detection and classification, but also feature pre-processing. PCA transformed time-domain features allow fault detection and classification without misclassification, relying on current and voltage measurements making two sensors necessary to generate the data. Optimal transformed time-frequency-domain features allow a misclassification free result as well, but as they are calculated from current measurements only, a dedicated voltage sensor is not necessary. Using those features is a promising alternative even for detecting purely supply voltage related faults.
Small vessels or unmanned surface vehicles only have a limited amount of space and energy available. If these vessels require an active sensing collision avoidance system it is often not possible to mount large sensor systems like X-Band radars. Thus, in this paper an energy efficient automotive radar and a laser range sensor are evaluated for tracking surrounding vessels. For these targets, those type of sensors typically generate more than one detection per scan. Therefore, an extended target tracking problem has to be solved to estimate state end extension of the vessels. In this paper, an extended version of the probabilistic data association filter that uses random matrices is applied. The performance of the tracking system using either radar or laser range data is demonstrated in real experiments.
Probabilistic data association for tracking extended targets under clutter using random matrices
(2015)
The use of random matrices for tracking extended objects has received high attention in recent years. It is an efficient approach for tracking objects that give rise to more than one measurement per time step. In this paper, the concept of random matrices is used to track surface vessels using highresolution automotive radar sensors. Since the radar also receives a large number of clutter measurements from the water, for the data association problem, a generalized probabilistic data association filter is applied. Additionally, a modification of the filter update step is proposed to incorporate the Doppler velocity measurements. The presented tracking algorithm is validated using Monte Carlo Simulation, and some performance results with real radar data are shown as well.
The method of signal injection is investigated for position estimation of proportional solenoid valves. A simple observer is proposed to estimate a position-dependent parameter, i.e. the eddy current resistance, from which the position is calculated analytically. Therefore, the relationship of position and impedance in the case of sinusoidal excitation is accurately described by consideration of classical electrodynamics. The observer approach is compared with a standard identification method, and evaluated by practical experiments on an off-the-shelf proportional solenoid valve.
A lot of procedures for estimating the spool position in linear electromagnetic actuators using voltage and current measurements only, can be found in the literature. Subject to the accuracy of the estimated spool position some achieve better, some worse results. However, in almost every approach hysteresis has a huge impact on the estimation accuracy that can be achieved. Regardless whether these effects are caused by magnetic or mechanical hysteresis, they will limit the accuracy of the position estimate, if not taken into account. In this paper, a model is introduced which covers the hysteresis effects as well as other nonlinear ities occurring in estimated position-dependent parameters. A classical Preisach model is deployed first, which is then adjusted by using novel elementary preceding Relay-Operators. The resulting model for the estimated position-dependent parameters including the adjusted Preisach model can be easily applied to position estimation tasks. It is shown that the considered model distinctly improves the accuracy for the spool position estimate, while it is kept as simple as possible for real-time implementation reasons.
A semilinear distributed parameter approach for solenoid valve control including saturation effects
(2015)
In this paper a semilinear parabolic PDE for the control of solenoid valves is presented. The distributed parameter model of the cylinder becomes nonlinear by the inclusion of saturation effects due to the material's B/H-curve. A flatness based solution of the semilinear PDE is shown as well as a convergence proof of its series solution. By numerical simulation results the adaptability of the approach is demonstrated, and differences between the linear and the nonlinear case are discussed. The major contribution of this paper is the inclusion of saturation effects into the magnetic field governing linear diffusion equation, and the development of a flatness based solution for the resulting semilinear PDE as an extension of previous works [1] and [2].
The improvement of collision avoidance for vessels in close range encounter situations is an important topic for maritime traffic safety. Typical approaches generate evasive trajectories or optimise the trajectories of all involved vessels. Such a collision avoidance system has to produce evasive manoeuvres that do not confuse other navigators. To achieve this behaviour, a probabilistic obstacle handling based on information from a radar sensor with target tracking, that considers measurement and tracking uncertainties is proposed. A grid based path search algorithm, that takes the information from the probabilistic obstacle handling into account, is then used to generate evasive trajectories. The proposed algorithms have been tested and verified in a simulated environment for inland waters.
Motion safety for vessels
(2015)
The improvement of collision avoidance for vessels in close range encounter situations is an important topic for maritime traffic safety. Typical approaches generate evasive trajectories or optimise the trajectories of all involved vessels. The idea of this work is to validate these trajectories related to guaranteed motion safety, which means that it is not sufficient for a trajectory to be collision-free, but it must additionally ensure that an evasive manoeuvre is performable at any time. An approach using the distance and the evolution of the distance to the other vessels is proposed. The concept of Inevitable Collision States (ICS) is adopted to identify the states for which no evasive manoeuvre exist. Furthermore, it is implemented into a collision avoidance system for recreational crafts to demonstrate the performance.