Project Radius

Railway digitalisation using drones

Currently monitoring of railway signalling assets is based on three main alternative methods: a) human maintenance activities; b) wired solutions; c) surveying using monitoring trains. All these methods impose severe limitations in terms of safety issues (i.e., presence of humans on the track), initial investment required and complexity (especially in the case of diagnostic trains), operating costs, limited set of the diagnostic data processed (especially in the case of wired solutions) and track occupation (in the case of human activities and diagnostic trains). 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 usually 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 improves on the current methods but requires compliance with aviation standards and norms in addition to those already existing in the railway environment.

Project funding

This project has received funding from the European Union Agency for the Space Programme under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004192.