A new approach to the levitation control of an electromagnetic suspension vehicle

A new approach to the levitation control of an electromagnetic suspension vehicle prototype is proposed. The prototype has four electromagnetic actuators of attractive type and four inductive gap sensors, all located at the corners of the prototype. The vehicle levitation is performed through the control of heave, roll and pitch. A three degree of freedom rigid body model is developed. A situation where the number of actuators is larger than the number of control variables is thus characterized. A command policy of actuators generates an optimal distribution of forces by the actuators in order to produce the force and moments required by the heave, roll and pitch controllers. A measurement processing is done on the signals of the gap sensors to generate estimates of heave, roll and pitch. To stabilize the closed-loop system, a controller with a lead-lag phase characteristic is implemented. The obtained experimental results show that the closed-loop system presents a good performance.