Develop a sensor based robot for railway inspection

Abstract

This project produced a sensor based robot capable of testing a section of railway track, using both magnetic flux and visual inspection. Surface quality inspection is performed by a probe consisting of a number of Hall effect sensors. Visual inspection is performed by a camera connected to the robot. A replica rail section was also created for the purposes of calibrating and demonstrating the robot. The hardware and software developed successfully collected video data and magnetic flux readings. The output of the hall effect sensor array was processed in MATLAB producing a heat-map. The shape and depth of artificially induced defects were successfully displayed.