China introduces robotic inspection of freight trains

China's first set of intelligent inspection robots for freight trains has been put into operation at Huanghua Port in north China's Hebei Province, showing a maximum capacity of inspecting 10 trains a day.

Wang Peng, deputy general manager of the Suning maintenance branch of the China Energy Railway Equipment Co., Ltd., said that the robots have achieved a 100 percent common fault recognition rate of trains.

"The robot set – one inspecting the train's underside and two checking its sides – can inspect 54 carriages in 135 minutes," said Wang.

Since its first operation on May 11, the robotic inspection facility has been applied in the train maintenance depot of Huanghua.

Wang said the number of side-inspecting robots is expected to reach 10 within four months. At that time, the inspection task, which previously required 16 people and took over 50 minutes, will be completed by the robot team in just 27 minutes.

Zhang Hao, a dispatcher in the workshop who oversees the robotic operations, said the intelligent robots photograph key areas while inspecting a 648-meter-long freight train with 54 carriages to collect fault data.

"The 15-centimeter-thick robot can finish a round trip of checking the train bottom in less than three minutes, capturing and documenting all suspected fault points before returning to its position for a charge and awaiting the next command," Zhang said.

Meanwhile, the two robots working on the sides are each equipped with two mechanical arms, featuring three sets of joints for vertical, horizontal and rotational movements. It takes approximately 2.5 minutes for the pair to complete scanning a single train carriage.

The set of three robots takes 9,450 high-definition images during train inspection. The intelligent system can promptly provide analysis results through data comparison, clearly indicating the location and over 120 types of suspected faults.

"Robots indeed work with higher precision than humans," acknowledged Lyu Dawei, a veteran maintenance worker who uses specialized tools to measure wheel dimensions during train inspection.