Indian Railways is very soon starting deployment of drones to monitor rail tracks, a step that will help national transporter focus on the safety aspect.
According to the reports, under an initiative of the telecom industry and the railways, IIT Roorkee has developed drones which are currently being tested on the tracks around the Uttarakhand town.
Anurag Vibhuti, deputy director of TCOE India said, The Indian Railways is in the advanced stages of considering deploying unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor rail tracks using the technology developed by IIT-Roorkee.
Notably, Telecom Centres of Excellence abbreviated as TCOE is a public-private telecom body under which RailTel Corporation( railways’ broadband services arm) has partnered IIT-Roorkee to develop the drones that will help automate rail track monitoring, which currently is a labour intensive process.
The plan is to use the drone in a way that it could eventually replace the conventional system of physical labour. Moreover, using drones for track monitoring will also help to reduce error in data assembling.
RD Bajpai, a spokesperson for the Indian Railways said,
“It has given directions to zonal railways to procure such (drone) cameras. This is in line with the government’s desire to use technology including artificial intelligence to enhance safety and efficiency in train operations.”
Meanwhile, IIT Roorkee has its next plans to seek use cases of artificial intelligence and Big Data that can help to analyse the images and information captured by the drones and make the monitoring work more real-time to predict faults on tracks.