Prediction of Dynamic Response of Vibration Isolated Railway Obstacle Detection System

The prototype of the on-board Obstacle Detection System (ODS), for GoA2 freight trains, was developed in the frame of H2020 project SMART. The developed prototype uses vision-based sensors, for environmental perception and obstacle detection. As severe image distortions while capturing imaging data can occur due to vibrations of the moving vehicle, the ODS of autonomous rail vehicles must be isolated from vibrations transmitting from the vehicle to have reliable image acquisition and post process analysis. The passive vibration isolation system was specially designed for suppression of moving rail vehicle vibrations during development of the ODS prototype. The paper presents the designed passive vibration system, as well as, experimental verification of its performance in operational conditions. Furthermore, two viscoelastic constitutive models, Voigt-Kelvin and Voigt-Maxwell, were applied to predict the dynamic response of vibration isolated ODS by using the real experimental data as system excitation.