On-board Electrical, Electronics and Pose Estimation System for Hyperloop Pod Design

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated on-board electrical system and a computationally efficient pose estimation algorithm for Hyperloop pods, focusing on power optimization, fault management, and system verification through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, space- and power-optimized electronics architecture and a robust pose estimation method tailored for Hyperloop pod applications.

Findings

Successful simulation-based validation of the proposed algorithms.

Enhanced fault detection and battery management strategies.

Optimized electrical system design for high-energy-density batteries.

Abstract

Hyperloop is a high-speed ground-based transportation system utilizing sealed tubes, with the aim of ultimately transporting passengers between metropolitan cities in efficiently designed autonomous capsules. In recent years, the design and development of sub-scale prototypes for these Hyperloop pods has set the foundation for realizing more practical and scalable pod architectures. This paper proposes a practical, power and space optimized on-board electronics architecture, coupled with an end-to-end computationally efficient pose estimation algorithm. Considering the high energy density and discharge rate of on-board batteries, this work additionally presents a robust system for fault detection, protection and management of batteries, along with the design of the surrounding electrical system. Performance evaluation and verification of proposed algorithms and circuits has been carried out by software simulations using both Python and Simulink.