A railway track reconstruction method using robotic vision on a mobile manipulator: A proposed strategy.

Autonomous robot integration in railways infrastructure maintenance accelerates the digitization and intelli-gence of infrastructure survey & maintenance, providing high-efficiency and low-cost execution. This paper proposes a health assessment based on 3D reconstruction technology for railway track maintenance using a mobile robotic sensing platform. By combining multiple sensing and taking advantage of a robotic manipulator, a digital model of the target track components is built by a robot-actuated vision system which provides better 3D structural and surface condition reconstruction. Global geo-location and surrounding laser scanning are inte-grated to reinforce the digital completeness of the model for intelligent management. The new method consists of the following steps: First, according to scheduled maintenance tasks, a Robotics Inspection and Repair System (RIRS) navigates to the task location and uses the onboard depth camera for positioning. Then robot-mounted vision system is guided with an automated trajectory to build the 3D reconstruction of the track or repair ob-ject using the vision modeling technique. Finally, the 3D reconstructed model is fused with surrounding mapping of depth vision and Lidar scanning. Both laboratory tests and a realistic track test validated the feasibility of the proposed method by creating an accurate 3D reconstructed model. The modeled rail steel section size is quan-titively compared with the ground truth in dimension, demonstrating good accuracy with a size error of less than 0.3 cm. The main contribution includes: (1) unmanned automatic 3D reconstruction by a robotic mobile manipulator, (2) the technique trims the reconstruction details & data to the specific maintenance goal or components, which supports the infrastructure maintenance towards the high-detailed & target-oriented digital management. This combination strategy of robotic automation and sensor fusion lies down a promising foun-dation for automated digital twin establishment for railway maintenance with autonomous RIRS, and upgrades technology readiness and digital intelligence for maintenance management