Localisation and Navigation Framework for Autonomous Railway Robotic Inspection and Repair System

In the path towards the intelligent industrial 4.0, the railway industry is keen to develop intelligent asset management strategies for digitalization and smart management for rail infrastructure. It aims to both reduce the cost and exposure of human-labor, associated with track maintenance risk, as well as increase the autonomy and accuracy for the railway inspection and repair job. A Robotic Inspection and Repair System (RIRS) is proposed to undertake the automated railway maintenance consisting of the autonomous off-track travel between base workshop and track, road-rail conversion, autonomous on-track inspection, and repair as well as remote communicating to railway signaling system and infrastructure system. This paper presents a localization and navigation framework for this new autonomous system; applied to the mentioned railway maintenance job. This system comprises a commercial Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV, named Warthog) with a robotic manipulator (UR10e), and multiple onboard sensors including Lidar, camera, RTK GNSS, IMU, wheel odometry, and multiple types of cameras. An adaptive trolley is also designed for the purpose of road-rail conversion. This research also focuses on how to increase accuracy for the support of track defect detection and localization.