RAILWAY DIGITALISATION USING DRONES

Project Information

RADIUS

Grant agreement ID: 101004192

DOI

10.3030/101004192

Project closed

EC signature date 6 November 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 October 2024

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Space

Total cost

€ 2 948 751,26

EU contribution

€ 2 064 125,88

Coordinated by

HITACHI RAIL STS SPA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RADIUS (RAILWAY DIGITALISATION USING DRONES)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2024-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Railway signalling assets monitoring is based on three alternative methods: a) human maintenance; b) wired solutions; c) monitoring trains. These methods impose severe limitations in terms of safety issues, initial investment and complexity, operating costs, a limited set of the diagnostic data processed, and track occupation. The direct result of these limitations is that the maintenance activities of railway lines are suboptimal, resulting in preventable failures that require expensive and disruptive reparations that imply the temporal interruption of the service in the affected tracks.
RADIUS proposes to use Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or drones to execute a large part of the inspection and maintenance tasks of signalling assets that improve on the current methods but require compliance with aviation standards and regulations besides those existing in the railway environment.
The aim of RADIUS is to develop a UAS-based technology to monitor the physical status and electronic functionality of both non-safety-critical and safety-critical railway signalling assets and to execute specific maintenance activities to pave the road to efficient and reliable unmanned aircraft activities in the railway domain.
The RADIUS automation will allow increased inspection frequency and is an enabler for future integration of drone technologies for railway inspection and maintenance, limiting activities carried out by human teams and improving the global railway operational service in terms of availability, reliability, and performance.
The major benefits provided by UAS in inspection and maintenance activities are:
- Overcome many of the limitations mentioned above in inspection and maintenance of signalling assets.
- Contribute to the digitalisation of the railway sector, recognised as a key trend by GSA.
- Replace most of the human maintenance and visual inspection activities.
- Increase the safety of the maintenance operations by requiring fewer people in the field.
- Reduce the complexity and the cost of maintenance activities using autonomous systems.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first part of the project, the consortium focused on understanding the stakeholder’s needs. In particular, a survey among the project partners to define the RADIUS requirements has been finalized. Then, thanks to this requirement analysis and the definition of the railway assets to include in the RADIUS framework, the RADIUS system specification has been defined and reported in a specific deliverable. Furthermore, in the first part of the project, a first version of the RADIUS business model was realized.
After that, a state of the art of UAS technologies, algorithms for image processing and obstacle avoidance has been carried out. Moreover, the COTS solution for what concern the docking station technologies to recharge the selected drone during the flight mission has been analysed. After the market and literature analysis, the partners chose the technologies for the RADIUS project prototype. Meanwhile, a ground segment simulator has been developed to test the communication protocols between the project components.
The partners met in Casa Branca (Portugal) to carry out preliminary images and video acquisitions on a valuable railway scenario for the data analytics activities. Moreover, the SORA risk assessment for these experiments began after defining the RADIUS business model and the test sites.
A pillar of the project is the dissemination, and the presentation of the results at international conferences is fundamental for this process. For this reason, the results of the RADIUS project have been presented at different conferences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

RADIUS will advance beyond the state-of-the-art in the following components of the solution:
- UAS sensing payload
- UAS positioning system
- UAS docking station integrated into a signalling asset
- Data analytics and digitalisation of assets from UAS
- 5G communication modules for the railway domain
- A working prototype, demonstrated in a relevant railway environment
The results of the project will have significant impacts:
- Significant contribution to the digitisation of industry and services in the railway domain, thank to the close links with the Shift2Rail IP3 initiative.
- RADIUS, by extending the use of drones in the railway domain to the inspection and maintenance of the signalling assets, offers a complementary application to those already existing. The planned use of EGNSS-based solutions will contribute to increase the market competitiveness of related chipsets and devices.
- As demonstrated by the Business Plan, the proposed RADIUS application has clear exploitation and commercialisation plan and all the needed actors to reach the planned targets.
- RADIUS will base its design on industry standards that are being developed and will contribute to the definition of these standards.
- The RADIUS results can be extended relatively easily to other linear transport modes with assets along the network and other industrial sectors with maintenance needs similar to those of railways, such as oil pipelines, offshore oil platforms, cell towers, security installation and electrical power lines.

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