On the design and development of an unmanned railway vehicle for high-speed railway-line surveillance

Failures in railway infrastructure can have catastrophic consequences, including significant economic losses. Safeguarding railway infrastructure against intentional threats, such as terrorism, necessitates effective protective measures. The development of an Unmanned Railway Vehicle (URV), equipped with vision systems to ensure the recognition of anomalies, aims to enhance surveillance and protection of high-speed lines. The need to keep the vehicle size and weight as smaller as possible prevented the use of the overhead contact line as power supply. Therefore, the URV powertrain has been realized according to a series-type hybrid architecture. In this work, the design of the powertrain architecture is proposed; then, the development of the control and management algorithms is presented. The vehicle performance have been validated by means of testing sessions on a roller test bench, where real mission profiles have been simulated. Finally, the experimental curves have been compared to the numerical results coming from simulations.