Publication: Design of smart crack detection robot for railway track
Date
2019
Authors
Lai, Lie How
Journal Title
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Volume Title
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Abstract
This paper presents a design and development of smart crack detection robot for railway track. In this particular project, a smart mobile robot is designed to detect the cracks in the railway track utilizing non-destructive crack detection method. The existing solutions in identifying the cracks is by using an inspection robot where visual inspection and human monitoring are involved. This automated robot consists of several subsystems which are drive system to control the robot motion, crack detection system to detect any rail cracks, measurement system to record the crack depth, localization system for tracking the geometry coordinates and the crack location with respect to the rail structure and lastly alerting system for sending the crack location through Short Message Service (SMS). The design requirements were obtained from the literature review and several concept designs were generated using morphological diagram, then Pugh matrix method is utilized to select the best concept design. The final design was modelled using PTC CREO Parametric and stress analysis was performed on the most critical part of the design. A prototype that involved mechanical and electronic components was fabricated and Aluminium bars were served as the dummy rails with multiple cracks created intentionally on it. Experiments were conducted to test its ability to detect the crack at various conditions such as different sensor positions, different material of the dummy rail, different robot speed and etc. In the final experiment conducted on the assembled prototype, the results shown that ultrasonic sensor is able to detect the crack with moderate accuracy and the errors happened have identified such as missed detection, inaccurate crack depth recorded and inaccurate geometry coordinates.
Description
TA460.L34 2019
Keywords
Metals , Robotics , Railway construction