IIT Roorkee is developing drones for the Indian Railways, which will be deployed to monitor rail tracks. This is being done in view of the safety concerns for commuters, which is a major priority for the government.

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”. Under the initiative of the telecom industry, IIT Roorkee is developing drones that are in the testing phase, in Uttarakhand.

The drones will work alongside, and hopefully, in lieu of the conventional manual labour system, which is a tough task especially during extreme weather. It is a known fact that train accidents are largely blamed on human error. The use of drones to monitor tracks and modern technologies to analyse data captured should leave little to no room for any error.

Vibhuti also added that the next stage for IIT Roorkee is to use artificial intelligence and big data to analyse the images and information captured by these drones, to make the monitoring process more real-time. The drone project was initially given to RailTel, but as they lacked R & D expertise, the project was then handed over to IIT Roorkee.

RD Bajpai, spokesperson for the Indian Railway said, “It has given directions to Zonal railways to procure such cameras. This is in line with the government’s desire to use technology including artificial intelligence to enhance safety and efficiency in train operations”. He also added that Jabalpur, Kota and Bhopal divisions already use this technology for monitoring tracks.

In its trial run, IIT Roorkee analysed the gauge distance with the help of images captured from the drones, using multiple computer vision and image processing techniques. A check for components of railway tracks such as fishplates, fasteners, sleepers, etc. is also being done to ensure that no component is missing. This will be done by analysing the images captured with the help of computer-vision technology, which is highly accurate and precise in detecting such faults.

The Indian Railways are historically notorious for the number of accidents occurring each year. Though the number has fallen in the recent years, there is a hope that such technology will help eliminate the problem altogether.

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