Automated Road-Rail Vehicle for In-Plant Shunting of Rolling Stock

Jung, Hans Christian; Schindler, Christian; Schwarz, G.; Eschmann, Frank; Zwiehoff, Stephan

doi:10.1061/9780784483886.017

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The principle of a road-rail vehicle and its general advantages over a dedicated locomotive for infrastructure maintenance or shunting are explained in refs. 9 and. 10 But on the downside, it appears to be slightly more prone to wheel-climb derailment as the vertical wheel force is machine-controlled.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(i) intelligent shunting locomotives 5,6 (ii) intelligent self-driving wagons 7,8 (iii) intelligent road-rail shunting vehicles 9 The principle of a road-rail vehicle and its general advantages over a dedicated locomotive for infrastructure maintenance or shunting are explained in refs. 9 and. 10 But on the downside, it appears to be slightly more prone to wheel-climb derailment as the vertical wheel force is machine-controlled.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 In order to make the shunting operation more cost-efficient and thereby contribute to the attractiveness of rail freight transport, numerous works are dedicated to its digitization and automation. Apart from sole assistance systems for shunting, 2–4 three basic approaches exist that focus on the automation of (rail) vehicles for shunting:(i) intelligent shunting locomotives 5,6 (ii) intelligent self-driving wagons 7,8 (iii) intelligent road-rail shunting vehicles 9 …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…11 In our previous work, a prototype of an automated shunting system was presented using a compact battery-electric road-rail vehicle equipped with sensors, computing and communication hardware. 9 Even though this approach already suggests better efficiency for shunting on small flat yards, its scope was limited to track-bound operation and therefore implies similar inflexibility common for shunting locomotives. For further exploitation of the advantage of a road-rail vehicle for shunting and enabling the operation both on rail and road domains, the rerailing procedure needs to be automated as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Automated rerailing of a road-rail shunting vehicle on road-level tracks using 2D-Lidar

Jung,

Niermeyer,

Manjunatheswaran

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F:

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Road-rail vehicles are emerging increasingly in small flat yards for shunting wagons. While numerous research works suggest automation of the shunting operation to improve its efficiency, the rerailing procedure of such vehicle, i.e., switching between road and rail mode, remains manually executed. Hence, we present a simple but novel method for a road-rail vehicle with skid-steer drive to rerail automatically on road-level tracks (e.g., level-crossing). The vehicle uses two 2D-Lidar sensors to scan the floor for (rail) in order to estimate its lateral displacement and angular orientation towards the track centre. A simplified model and a PID-type controller for the yaw rate were deployed while keeping the linear velocity constant for the vehicle to align itself at the centre of and parallel to the track. Upon reaching the goal, the rail wheels are descended and the rerailing is completed. Test runs were conducted from a random initial pose near the track centre while limiting the travel range in x-direction to 2.5 m, yet allowing a change of direction each time the vehicle reaches this limit. In 97% of the test runs, the vehicle rerailed successfully in 47 s on average (12 s of which was needed for lowering the rail wheels) with three changes of direction or less. In the remaining 3% of cases it took more attempts. Automated rerailing could be used not only as assistance function for the shunting personnel, but also as important feature of an autonomous shunting robot that is able to access both road and rail domains.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Automated rerailing of a road-rail shunting vehicle on road-level tracks using 2D-Lidar

Jung,

Niermeyer,

Manjunatheswaran

et al. 2024

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F:

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“…Our approach is based on a compact, battery-powered road-rail vehicle that is equipped with sensors and an automatic coupling. 2 It is remote-controlled from a stationary control centre and operates at low velocities (<8 km/h) even though the German regulations for sidings and industrial railways generally allow a maximum velocity of 25 km/h. According to an internal feasibility study, such a low velocity did not result in a substantial decrease of shunting capacity when single wagons or wagon groups were moved.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental investigation on RFID-odometer-based localization of an automated shunting vehicle

Jung

Eschmann²,

Schindler

2023

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F:

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Continuous information on the current location of a vehicle in its infrastructure is essential for automated driving. However, industrial railways and shunting operations may entail boundary conditions which are not suitable for widespread satellite-based positioning. Hence, this paper presents a positioning system, based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) and odometer, which was developed and tested on an automated road-rail vehicle for shunting at low velocities. The achieved accuracy for discrete positioning with RFID was estimated at 0.22 m. In quasi-continuous positioning between consecutive RFID tags, the odometer exhibited an error of −2.2% to 0.7% of travelled distance depending on the investigated stationary driving states and sensor data evaluation. Apart from enhancement potentials for the RFID system, the results also indicated the odometer to be prone to the shunting vehicle dynamics when the rotation of its rail wheels is measured. Furthermore, the shunting vehicle appears to run constantly with a notable lateral displacement even on straight tracks due to the property of its running gear, causing a systematic underestimation of the travelled distance.

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Conceptualization of Communication and Localization Components for Automated Shunting

Michler,

Schwarzbach,

Engelbrecht

et al. 2023

2023 8th International Conference on Models and Technologies for Intelligent Transportation Systems (MT-ITS)

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Automated Road-Rail Vehicle for In-Plant Shunting of Rolling Stock

Cited by 3 publications

References 6 publications

Automated rerailing of a road-rail shunting vehicle on road-level tracks using 2D-Lidar

Automated rerailing of a road-rail shunting vehicle on road-level tracks using 2D-Lidar

Experimental investigation on RFID-odometer-based localization of an automated shunting vehicle

Conceptualization of Communication and Localization Components for Automated Shunting

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