A Review on Technologies for Localisation and Navigation in Autonomous Railway Maintenance Systems

Abstract

Smart maintenance is essential to achieving a safe and reliable railway, but traditional maintenance deployment is costly and heavily human-involved. Ineffective job execution or failure in preventive maintenance can lead to railway service disruption and unsafe operations. The deployment of robotic and autonomous systems was proposed to conduct these maintenance tasks with higher accuracy and reliability. In order for these systems to be capable of detecting rail flaws along millions of mileages they must register their location with higher accuracy. A prerequisite of an autonomous vehicle is its possessing a high degree of accuracy in terms of its positional awareness. This paper first reviews the importance and demands of preventive maintenance in railway networks and the related techniques. Furthermore, this paper investigates the strategies, techniques, architecture, and references used by different systems to resolve the location along the railway network. Additionally, this paper discusses the advantages and applicability of on-board-based and infrastructure-based sensing, respectively. Finally, this paper analyses the uncertainties which contribute to a vehicle’s position error and influence on positioning accuracy and reliability with corresponding technique solutions. This study therefore provides an overall direction for the development of further autonomous track-based system designs and methods to deal with the challenges faced in the railway network.

Exploring Quantum Sensing Potential for Systems Applications

“…The unreliability or lack of service provided by GPS in urban areas, high latitudes, or the subsurface poses a significant challenge to locating and navigation applications. For example, if GPS signals are disrupted, autonomous vehicles that rely extensively on satellite navigation may have safety and operational issues [83]. While researchers and industry vendors work to develop technologies that enable continuous localization and safe control of autonomous vehicles even in the absence of a GPS signal, there is still a significant gap between existing technologies that support precise, accurate, and sustainable positioning and time [83].…”

Technical Aspects and Social Science Expertise to Support Safe and Secure Handling of Autonomous Railway Systems

“…In a recent work by [10], autonomous maintenance technologies for localisation and navigation have been presented. Respective technologies, such as on-board sensors, like Inertia Measurement Unit (IMU), tachometers, satellite-based position systems and cameras are used to identify the exact location, speed and other factors regarding the trains.…”

Identification of optimal accelerometer placement on trains for railway switch wear monitoring via multibody simulation

“…Subsequently, it enables the accurate and efficient allocation of limited resources for maintenance and renewal. To achieve this goal, the use of smart and cutting-edge sensors and technologies has become popular, especially for continuous rail track monitoring (Castillo-Mingorance et al, 2020;Rahimi et al, 2022).…”