Solar implementation and Control Unit

The idea of the project is to introduce a transportation system, where solar is the main power supply and reduce the carbon emission. I have seen the documents about the solar wayside power pickup but no actual prototype has been installed yet. My goal for this semester is to design a wayside power pickup system to transfer power directly from solar cells onto the onboard bogie. Initially, it will be installed on the scale project to demonstrate its sole purpose and run many iterations to its perfect design. It is easy to made changes on small bogie as compared to the full scale, and it's also cost effective. The design requires highly conductive material to be installed on the tracks and a connection pivot on the bogie. Once the bogie is placed on the track the connection pivot will then complete the circuit. There are many safety design that needs to be implemented parallel with the design. The connection pivot should be manually controlled to minimize the current shock or in the worst case it should cut power upon detecting any danger. The following figure shows a rough sketch of the deign.

Wayside Pickup power
http://www.magnetictransportsystems.com/magnerail.shtml

The next portion of my investigation will be to work on the control system of the scale model. It is the single most important aspect of the project for automation. I have seen in many demos about the glitches of the bogie. The non-responsive operation of the bogie, missing stations, and getting stalled on the tracks were seen during the demo. Upon talking to previous year team mates and summer colleagues, they have suggested to change the support system of rails to a differential design and also create new tracks using long piece of aluminum, smoothing the corners and welding parts will improve bogie's operation. The goal for this year will be to fix the track and redesign if necessary, also make it wider and add more stations to resemble the actual function of full scale model, robust the communication system of the bogie with the master controller, and also introduce more bogies to the track to operate at the same time. There will be many challenges in the completion of this project but i believe with hard work and a set goal everything is possible.