The German Railway (Deutsche Bahn AG) intends to introduce an automatic coupler for freight cars to increase the efficiency of the marshalling process and to humanize it. To speed up the train-handling process in the approach zone and thetrain-formation process in the distribution yard an actuator is needed to automate the unlocking of these couplers while freight cars are moving above the hump with a speed of up to 3 m/s. For these purposes a new manipulator and an extension of theautomatic coupler [1] have been developed and realized at the Institute of Automatic Control in Aachen, Germany, and are presented from a mechatronic point of view in this paper.
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