Measurement System Design of Pantograph Slider Wear Using Binocular Structured Light

In response to the increasing automation requirements for measuring the wear of pantograph slider in rail vehicles, this paper presents a pantograph slider wear measurement system based on binocular structured light. The system captures image data of pantograph slider from different perspectives using line-structured light and binocular cameras, utilizes structured light information for feature matching and calculates three-dimensional point cloud data based on binocular vision principles. The DBSCAN algorithm is used to denoise and segment the point cloud data, and then the Gaussian smoothing method is used to smooth the segmented point cloud data. The cross-sectional point cloud of the smoothed point cloud is intercepted along the direction of the train. Finally, the cross-sectional point cloud is registered with the unworn standard pantograph slider’s cross-sectional point cloud. The maximum distance between the point clouds in the slider region after registration represents the maximum wear value of the target pantograph slider. Experimental results demonstrates that the system exhibits high measurement accuracy and strong stability in repeated measurements, with a measurement error of less than 0.3 mm. It holds certain engineering application value.