Robotic platform for deep change detection for rail safety and security

Felix is the first robot measuring switch dimension parameters and geometrical railway ones together with potentially dangerous situations. It increases the quality and the consistency of the measures and offers the chance to increase the safety of operators and ultimately of final users. This paper presents a novel approach mixing visual and point cloud information for effective change detection for railways safety and security application. Main contributions are on the proposed data platform and on the mix of point-based measurements (switch dimensions) and on surrounding change detection (dangerous trees or abnormal railway trawlers) based multi-view camera and linear laser, processed by a classification process. Results, coming from a real rail scenario using the Felix platform, show the feasibility of the approach and the fast surveying capabilities with strong implications on safety and security.