Research on automatic image acquisition for inspection by a mobile robot in railway signal houses

-Prototyping and field testing of a mobile robot -

Abstract

This paper describes a method of automatic image acquisition by a mobile robot for efficient equipment inspection (mainly visual inspection) in railway signal houses. First, concerning operational convenience, an autonomous travelling function combined with SLAM and line follower is proposed. Next, the desired image quality for the captured images is defined, and a concept for capturing images to meet this requirement is described. Finally, after building a prototype of a robot, we conducted field tests for two functions, an automatic patrol function that takes pictures at all pre-defined capturing spots in sequence and a capturing function at requested points that takes pictures only at selected spots.