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Accurate and continuous control of vehicle movement and interaction is critical to the success of many transport systems. MagneMotion has developed a state-of-the-art control system with a scalable distributed architecture that can safely and efficiently manage many vehicles on a common network of track. Key features include intelligent management of traffic flow for maximum throughput, distributed communication between control modules for exceptional scalability, and built-in self-diagnostics and troubleshooting for rapid identification of impending and existing malfunctions. Even in the event of any single component failure or a total loss of system power, operators can always bring the vehicles to a safe and controlled stop, know their exact position, and bring them home to a station or work area under wayside backup power.

Currents driven in the motor stator interact with permanent magnets on the vehicle to create thrust. Wheels simply guide the vehicle, and provide no drive, allowing for reliable acceleration and braking in all weather conditions.

Due to the nature of linear motors, only one vehicle may reside over a single motor at any given time, resulting in a collision-free system. To enforce this restriction, vehicles are granted permission to move over another motor only if it is free of other vehicles. The control system stops the vehicle over the last motor for which permission was granted.

Before the vehicle starts slowing down to stop at the desired location, it requests permission to enter the next motor in its path. If permission is granted, the vehicle continues moving with no braking. If another vehicle currently resides over the motor in question, the request will be denied and the vehicle will brake until the other vehicle relinquishes the motor. Motor permissions are relinquished after a vehicle has completely exited the motor, resulting in "brick-wall" headways between vehicles.

Vehicles must exit their position over a motor completely before another vehicle moves to enter it. If the second vehicle wanted to go farther than the first, it will still be required to stop over the motor prior to the location of the first vehicle. All requests and transfers occur in “real-time,” with hundreds of requests occurring per second. At high speeds, braking to stop at a desired location may begin ten or more motors before the stopping point. When blocks are short relative to the stopping distances, the system can achieve performance close to that of a moving block system.

Responsibility for the vehicle and for acquiring transfer permissions is passed along from motor to motor as the vehicle moves down the line. If a failure occurs, no new permissions are granted and all the vehicles come to a controlled stop over the last motor for which permission was granted.

The resulting optimized traffic flow and efficiency makes the QuickStick Control System a vital part of the QuickStick LSM solution, enabling a groundbreaking level of throughput and real-time control for manufacturing and material handling systems. The QuickStick control system can be scaled to handle vehicles of any size, as long as the support structure, motor strength, and magnet array meet system requirements.

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MagneMotion's QuickStick system utilizes a single point of control to the customer premise control system (referred to as the "Host" control system). This simplifies the interaction of system commands and status between the Host and QuickStick system. With each QuickStick system, MagneMotion supplies a reference Host controller to allow the user to rapidly bring up new systems and become familiar with vehicle control and system component status. A screenshot of the Host Interface utility is shown here. All of the information necessary to show system and vehicle status in real time is available via the host interface. The QuickStick system can also be controlled exclusively with industry standard Rockwell Automation(tm) Programmable Logic Controllers utilizing the Ethernet/IP protocol. Like the QuickStick host system interface, the Ethernet/IP interface supplies all of the information necessary to show system and vehicle status in real time. The commands and data available via Ethernet/IP can be used to rapidly create custom human machine interfaces to integrate rapidly with an existing customer premise PLC based control system. Both control system interfaces are independent and can even be used simultaneously on a single QuickStick system. Click on the image to view a video of the control system display with vehicles in motion.

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