02.06.17
RSSB moves forward on robotic rolling stock maintenance innovations
Four new robotic technologies to maintain and inspect rolling stock are ready to be taken forward and developed for the rail industry, the RSSB has announced.
The projects, which are all part of an RSSB funded programme of work, seek to find ways to improve problems including capacity, passenger safety and also look to reduce the time and cost of rolling stock maintenance.
The technologies include an innovation being developed by Brunel which automatically services passenger train fluids.
“The quality of fluid servicing will improve as a monitored automated system can deliver a reduction in out-of-service trains due to missed top-ups,” the RSSB stated. “The increase in servicing capacity helps ensure that the overall capacity on the network is maintained, helping to improve the efficiency of train operating companies and reduce operating costs.”
And another innovation being developed is a robot that cleans the front of the train cab between Cranfield University and Heriot-Watt University. Though the side of rolling stock can be cleaned using rollers, the complicated shape of the front of the train and the delicate details mean that the front must be cleaned by hand.
“This project designed and constructed a prototype which is low-cost, robust and easy to use that washes the cab front nose and body end panels between carriages,” the RSSB’s statement said. “The cleaning head is mounted on a robot wrist with an orthogonal base and designed so the cleaning head applies a constant force as it moves across the surface of the front cab.”
The final two technologies include a non-destructive testing technique for railway wheelsets that uses infra-red and electro-magnetic sensors to create a high definition picture of cracks and damage not seen by the naked eye on wheelsets. The next stage requires the development and testing of an industrial grade prototype followed by a pre-commercial prototype to be deployed on a test site.
And the University of Birmingham is also working on using autonomous systems for wheelset reworking to reduce the whole-life maintenance costs of trains by reducing the time required to perform inspection and maintenance activities. The next phase of research will focus on the development of emerging wheelset inspection technologies.
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